"Oṃ—"
The primordial syllable shuddered up from the depths of his soul, a dawn bell shattering the dark.
Amamiya Rin felt his awareness rising. The cold of his flesh receded, and in its place came a vast, open field of vision.
He saw himself standing in the black rain. He saw countless distant lights, oblivious, burning on in the far city. He saw the cold pressing closer behind him. And he saw every soul in the alley, each one teetering on the edge of collapse.
The young man who had been first to recognize Delusion Ultraseven had his mouth stretched wide, but no whole sound came out. Pitch-black hair coiled soundlessly around his throat, dragging him inch by inch into a squirming patch of darkness on the wall.
His face went scarlet. He thrashed, flailed, fought - and it did not slow his devouring by so much as a hair.
In seconds half his body had sunk into that darkness in the wall, as though settling into thick tar.
"Help… me…"
The barely audible plea drowned under a rising tide of screams.
"Don't come near me… please, don't come near me!"
A middle-aged woman had crumpled to the ground, her legs kicking uselessly against the slick pavement as she tried to put distance between herself and the woman in front of her.
Then a cold touch landed on her from behind, and hanging strands of hair brushed her skin until the chill went through her whole body.
"Get away! Get away from me!"
The two high schoolers who had been shoving each other around now stood back to back, shaking like leaves in an autumn wind.
Around them: three, four, five - more and more stiff-limbed copies of Kayako surfacing without a sound. From the corner of the alley. From the low eaves overhead. Even out of the reflections in the puddles beneath their feet. Their eyes were hollow, and out of that hollowness poured a hatred that scorched the mind.
The boy who had thrown the punches tried to swing again; his arm was too heavy to lift. The one who had taken the punches tried to kick away the shape closing in; his foot stayed nailed to the ground as if filled with lead.
Terror at its extreme had frozen every nerve of resistance. All that remained was the chatter of teeth.
"Daddy, Mommy looks all wrong…"
A little girl's voice cracked into a sob. Her father followed her pointing finger, and his pupils blew wide with horror.
His wife only looked confused. Behind her, a figure in white was seeping slowly into her body like a melting wax figure, and she felt nothing at all.
But the face reflected in the eyes of father and daughter was no longer his wife's face. It was a twisted, swollen thing.
Sato hauled the camera onto his shoulder, and the shaking lens recorded every second of the despair.
The fever and curiosity stirred up moments ago by the appearance of an Ultraman had been ground into powder.
People shoved and wept and tried to run, tried to fight - and found that no matter where they fled, no matter what they did, there was no escaping the dark.
That was it. The darkest hour had arrived. One of the endings of the Ju-on cycle: a curse with its limits stripped away, spreading without end until every last human being was dead.
The countdown to humanity's extinction.
"So it's beginning?"
The surging despair and curse poured into Amamiya Rin's awareness.
"No. You have to be joking. How could humanity be driven to this? A reality like that - I refuse to accept it!"
His consciousness sank further, into a deeper stratum, and down in that depth something scaldingly hot detonated.
The contemplative field of Dhyana took the full force of that explosive torrent of feeling and did not break. Instead it became a levee, and the flood found its channel.
Fifty years of Dhyana practice, the Perfect Penetration of the Ear-Faculty and its insight into self-nature - in this moment none of it served emptiness. All of it served to carry an attachment of the most extreme kind.
The treasuring of life. The defense of ordinary days. Love for the simple fact of human existence, and the will to protect it.
The feeling had not come from nowhere. It came from every person who had shown him kindness or lent him a hand since he arrived in this world. It came from the long stretch of the Dream World, from the countless partings and reunions he had watched and shared in, from an unshakable faith in that faint, stubborn thread of goodness running through human nature.
Now every one of those small streams was gathered under a single, unbreakable thought.
Strip away all calculation of personal gain and loss. Strip away every stray thought.
Refine down to nothing but that impulse to lift away suffering, welling up out of self-nature at the sight of the suffering of all beings.
Then magnify it.
A protective urge that answered to no reason, so fierce it verged on violence, grew wild inside him.
Why should they die here?
Why should these people - living ordinary lives, carrying their own petty troubles and small hopes - be buried alongside a curse?
They ought to live. To see tomorrow's sun. To complain about crowded trains, to laugh at stupid variety shows, to go on loving, go on resenting, go on worrying, go on moving forward, go on living lives that might be unremarkable but were real and precious.
"I won't let them die here!"
"Not one of them!"
"Humanity - I will protect it myself!"
The thought hardened into the most immovable of attachments, and became the flame that lit everything.
Amamiya Rin's eyes snapped open.
Deep in his pupils, a point of white heat kindled - the light of the source itself, erupting out of the depths of his mind.
BOOOOM—!!!!
A pillar of light, blazing like the first dawn at the splitting of heaven and earth, ran from where Amamiya Rin stood straight through the sky.
The malice-soaked black rain evaporated the instant it met the radiance. A vast hole was punched through the darkness blanketing the heavens. The shadows flooding the streets and alleys melted like snow under a summer sun.
The light did not sting the eyes, yet it carried an authority and a warmth nothing could refuse. It lit every terrified face. It traced the outline of every building.
"Wha- what is that?!"
The two high schoolers stopped shaking. They tilted their heads back, mouths open wide enough to swallow an egg, that heaven-piercing column mirrored in their pupils.
Around the throat of the young man being dragged by the black hair, the coils went slack all at once.
He hit the ground, clutching his neck, coughing violently, eyes fixed on the pillar of light that joined sky to earth. Where suffocating despair had been, there was only bewilderment now.
"Light…"
The father holding his daughter murmured it. The little girl in his arms stopped sobbing and stared through her tears at that warm source. The curse's incarnation still stood right beside them, and still neither of them could pull their eyes from the light.
"That light is…"
Sato's shouldered camera jolted, then locked onto the beam and held it. His fingers clamped down on the equipment. The fear on his face set hard - and then, slowly, guesswork and hope spread across it.
In the alley, the shoving and the weeping stopped as though someone had hit pause.
Every eye turned toward the light.
It was gentle on the eyes, and it carried hope. It pushed back the spreading malice. It pushed back the panic that had been about to break them.
For a moment there was nothing but heavy breathing, stifled whimpers, and countless wide eyes reflecting that silver-white glow.
The darkness had been torn open.
A towering silhouette rose out of the endless sea of light.
A magnificent frame of interwoven red and silver, its lines fluid and packed with strength, descending with the steadiness of a mountain.
The signature blade crowned its head, edges trailing keen streaks of light. The head tilted slightly downward. The emerald point set in its brow was like a third eye, gazing deep into this cursed stretch of earth. From the milk-white oval eyes, the downturned gaze held a tenderness and resolve for the people below that bordered on obsession.
That was…
"Ultraseven!"
One of the back-to-back boys sucked in a sharp breath, his voice cracking with excitement, wild joy breaking across his face.
"Ultraseven?!"
The middle-aged woman sprawled on the ground murmured it in a daze. The fear drained out of her eyes like a receding tide, and what filled them instead was close to religious fervor.
"Ultra… seven?"
The father holding his daughter shuddered from head to foot. He looked at that solid, broad-shouldered giant, and something he had no words for surged hot into his eyes. He pulled his daughter tight against him and pointed. "Look! It's an Ultraman! It's Ultraseven! He really came!"
"Ultraman! Help me! Ultraseven! Save my mommy!"
The tear tracks on the little girl's face hadn't dried yet. She looked up at the red-and-silver giant bathed in silver-white radiance, forced her arm up, waved at him, and shouted with everything she had, her eyes full of hope.
The giant of light turned his head a fraction. The milk-white eyes swept the crowd below, over all that tangled excitement and pleading and hope. His gaze was still as deep water, and it held a warmth and steadiness like a star's. When it passed over the little girl waving her arm, it seemed to rest there an instant - a promise given without words, flowing like warmth through the heart of everyone watching him.
That was right.
That was Ultraseven.
Not a delusion warped out of negative energy or grudge. This was a giant of light kindled with the fuel of absolute love for humanity and the will to protect it, carried on the brightness manifested by original mind and self-nature, wearing the faith and hope of ordinary people as its body - born in answer to a wish, at the bottom of the abyss of despair.
He stood beneath a strange sky woven of black rain and white light. Radiance streamed off him and lit the broken street, lit every tear-streaked face where hope had returned, and lit the center of the rubble too - where a thick knot of hatred had come to a sudden boil at this manifestation of light, shrieking without sound.
In the darkest hour, the giant of light descends.
His name: Ultra Seven.
Beneath that towering figure, Delusion Ultraseven, a shape molded out of grudge, looked crude beyond words - a pitiful counterfeit.
Psychic Tomie tipped her head back to look at the giant of light that Amamiya Rin had become, glanced at the increasingly insubstantial blue figure beside her, and let unmistakable defeat show on her face.
"I really couldn't do it, huh… I copied his techniques and his memories over just fine, but my temperament and my willpower are still nowhere close."
Psychic Tomie let out a long sigh.
But her body loosened all the same.
She might have made a mess of things, but Amamiya Rin had come to cover for her. The fight from here on was his. She could retire to the audience seats.
Ultraseven, giant of light, paid no attention to that small ripple of feeling off in the corner. Facing Kayako, facing that endless hatred, he silently took a combat stance.
He raised his left arm slightly, fingers aimed with precision at the ground below.
A point of green light kindled soundlessly at his fingertips - and burst free.
"Rope Beam!"
Not a thick torrent of energy. A slender, dense green line that moved as if it were alive.
"Shhk—!"
The first green line shot out and wrapped precisely around a Kayako copy seeping from a wall, cinching tight and turning solid in the same instant, binding her fast.
But that was only the opening.
After taking its first target, the Rope Beam did not fade. It ricocheted, forked, and spread at terrifying speed, like a living thing capable of endless division and extension.
"Shhk shhk shhk shhk—!!"
Hundreds, thousands of green lines split and shot outward, a great net unrolling across the whole alley, the neighboring streets, even distant windows and rooftops.
Every line found its mark.
The stiff copies standing and walking. The pallid shapes crawling out of shadows. Even the curse-entities that had already sunk partway into residents' bodies.
The lines wound around necks, limbs, torsos, and the moment they touched they hardened into tough, glowing ropes of energy, locking their captives down.
"Gaah—!"
The possessed mother's body convulsed, and a blurred white apparition was hauled bodily out of her back by a green rope.
"Honey!"
"Mommy!"
The mother sagged to the ground, coughing hard. Husband and daughter threw themselves at her, cheering, wrapping her up in their arms.
The Kayako copy thrashed uselessly in its bindings.
In the alley, green light swept over the long black hair tangled around residents, and it snapped and dispersed. The wall-shadow dragging the young man took several Rope Beams straight through it, cinched tight, and was hauled out of the brickwork like a bundle of cargo, exposing the twisted human shape inside.
The Rope Beam spread faster than anyone could follow. Within seconds, in a radius of several kilometers around Ultraseven, every Kayako copy - visible or hidden - had been caught by that green web of light, torn off the humans they clung to, dragged free of whatever they had attached themselves to.
"Kkkk… kkkkkk!!"
The sharp, venomous rattle rose from the throats of countless bound copies at once. They writhed like mad, hair exploding outward to shred the ropes - but the green energy cords held, tough beyond reason, and kept drawing tighter.
Ultraseven held his left arm steady in the air, the light at his fingertips never guttering. He adjusted the angle a fraction, like a fisherman hauling in a net.
At the push of his will, every Kayako copy fastened to the far end of a rope was yanked skyward at once by a pull nothing could resist.
Hundreds upon hundreds of white figures bound in green cord rose like meteors flying backward, like dolls snatched up by an invisible hand - hauled out of every corner of the alley, out of neighboring windows, off distant rooftops - tearing through the curtain of black rain, converging on a single destination: the air above the ruins of the Saeki house.
The white shapes packed together inside the green net until they formed a warped little mountain of bloodless human forms, with countless retracting green beams trailing beneath it, all of them running back at last to his fingertips.
Ultraseven watched that struggling, wailing mass of curse with cold calm.
He did not move to the next step immediately. He turned his body slightly instead, using his enormous frame to block the ruins and the mass of curse from view, putting the still-shaken crowd behind him.
____
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