"Good boy, good boy. Come now, tell me - what do those people outside really want?"
Mara Tomie tilted her head, a strand of black hair slipping off her shoulder to catch the dim yellow light with a satin sheen. Her tone was idle, her lips caught somewhere between a smile and nothing at all.
"A young man in a white kariginu. By the Superintendent-General's order, that man is the bottom line of the negotiation. Everyone else is a smokescreen. As long as he survives, if it comes to it, even the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Department can be written off."
The negotiation team leader's eyes were hollow, as though veiled in mist, but his answer came without the slightest hesitation.
"The Soul Reviver…?"
Mara Tomie turned the thought over, her gaze drifting to the unconscious Soul Reviver.
Since Swordmaster Tomie had knocked him out, he had lain there without stirring, no different from the rest.
At that same moment, Swordmaster Tomie opened her eyes.
In that instant, deep in her pitch-black pupils, a sliver of pale light flashed and vanished - like a peerless swordsman drawing steel in a darkened room. In the moment the blade cleared the scabbard, all her killing intent and edge condensed into a single line, and the air in front of her seemed to shiver, dust rolling outward under an invisible pressure.
Her cross-legged body had not shifted a hair, yet her right hand was already on the hilt of the sword laid across her knees. A turn of the wrist, and the point rose without a sound, aimed at the Soul Reviver's throat. [Remember this site's domain - Tiantian Novels -> ttks.tw]
The runes along the blade lit with a faint white glow. A single thought, and the Soul Reviver would die under her sword.
"My my, my my~"
Mara Tomie's voice floated in from the side, rising and falling in lilting curves, every word wrapped in a coquettish pout, and it cut Swordmaster Tomie's motion short.
"You open your eyes and go straight to killing? What is this, a Guan Yu cosplay?"
Her last syllable curled upward, thick with mockery.
"Whatever the enemy wants to protect should be destroyed," Swordmaster Tomie said coldly, sparing Mara Tomie a single glance.
It was the simplest logic. Why the enemy wanted the Soul Reviver protected, what chain of consequences his death might set off - none of that fell within Swordmaster Tomie's considerations. Trivialities did not interest her.
"Crude and simple, aren't you. Though really, that head of yours has room for nothing but yourself."
Mara Tomie wound a lock of hair around her fingertip, red lips curving into a bewitching arc.
Swordmaster Tomie's brows drew together - not far, but every line of her face pulled taut with it, and that icy stare cut into Mara Tomie's eyes like a honed blade.
She had no need to speak. The hostility and impatience in her look said it for her.
"Haah!"
Mara Tomie shook her head and sighed over how slow on the uptake Swordmaster Tomie was, though even the sigh carried laughter in it.
"Think about it. Why is the Soul Reviver the bottom line? Because the moment he dies, every person kept alive by him drops dead too. One stroke and it's all settled - very tidy."
She raised a single finger and put the question to Swordmaster Tomie like a tease.
"And? Am I supposed to care about their lives?" Swordmaster Tomie shot back, hard and flat, her grip on the sword unmoving.
"Of course you don't need to. Your goal is climbing higher by cutting this country down, after all. But I do need them. I need lots and lots of little puppies to rule this country through, and if all the little puppies holding the power suddenly died off, wouldn't that be terribly boring?"
Mara Tomie narrowed her eyes, her smile turning more gorgeous still.
Boring. Not troublesome - boring.
True, killing the Soul Reviver would wipe out a whole swath of high officials whose lives he sustained, leaving the survivors warier and more attentive. Mara Tomie could not have cared less about that. What she cared about was a different amusement.
Toys she could play with freely, whose minds she could rewrite and whose personalities she could edit without ever upsetting Rin - at present, this batch was the only one.
"Suit yourself."
A cold snort escaped Swordmaster Tomie's nose. The killing intent had not entirely faded, but the point of the sword drifted away from the Soul Reviver's vitals. She reversed her grip and slid the Soul Reviver's Sword back into its scabbard, sparing no further glance at the unconscious previous-generation Soul Reviver.
"There, that's better."
Mara Tomie smiled, satisfied - a smile like a poppy in full bloom, beautiful and lethal.
"I've talked plenty about my toys. What about you? Sitting there hugging that sword all this while, surely you weren't just meditating? Let me have a look - what has our great Swordmaster come up with?"
Mara Tomie's eyes glittered, her tone light again with curiosity.
Swordmaster Tomie looked down at her left hand. Her fingers folded slowly closed, the knotted sinew across the back of her hand and forearm swelling faintly, and beneath the skin a very pale, warm white light seemed to flow.
The next second, her hulking frame began to shrink. The heaped muscle, the hardened, keratinized skin - all of it smoothed, softened and reshaped at a pace the eye could follow.
Her shoulders narrowed. Her chest lost its thickness. Her waist drew in, and the heavy lines of her arms and legs stretched long and even.
Within a few breaths she had returned to her original, well-proportioned female form. Without seeing it firsthand, no one would imagine what raw power this slender-looking body had unleashed a moment ago.
At the same time, the rhythm of Swordmaster Tomie's breathing shifted in subtle ways.
The long, steady in-and-out had become a deeper, slower cycle.
With every inhalation the air around her seemed to gather faintly inward. With every exhalation something formless seeped out through the pores of her body.
The whole feel of her had changed.
Mara Tomie caught it at once. Swordmaster Tomie's presence was… stronger. Stronger than any burst she had shown before, and sustained, and steady with it.
Swordmaster Tomie raised her right arm, fingers pressed straight as a blade, and swept them casually at an undamaged stretch of floor beside her.
Crack!
The hand-blade cut through the air and came down carrying a heavy pressure of wind. The instant her fingertips touched, the thick hardwood floor split as though under an invisible edge. A clean gash nearly an inch deep and close to two meters long opened in it, wood shavings curling up on both sides.
That delicate hand was untouched. Swordmaster Tomie lifted her palm and turned her wrist. The skin of that small hand was still soft and pale, without so much as a red mark on it.
"The basics of the new Breathing Method. Breathing guides that life force into waves inside the body, and the waves release tremendous strength. The current ceiling is… five times my normal power. Anything stronger and the burst tears the flesh apart."
Swordmaster Tomie said it lightly, as naturally as if she were commenting on the weather - though snapping a biscuit in half would not have sounded this effortless.
As she spoke, her palm settled against the floor beside her again.
Threads of milky light, like smoke, like mist, seeped slowly from the pores of her palm. They did no damage to the wood at all. Instead, as though alive, they sank into the grain of the boards and travelled along the structure beneath - joists, foundations, the soil below - spreading soundlessly toward every corner of the estate.
The spreading light carried no offensive power, and the eye could hardly pick it out from the earth and timber. It was a stone dropped into a still lake, sending out ripples no one could see.
Mara Tomie watched with her head tilted, thoroughly entertained. Her own eyes saw nothing, of course; she was borrowing Swordmaster Tomie's senses through the [Tomie Network], feeling out the life force flowing from those pores.
It was a biological radar. The released life force spread outward and echoed back without pause, every returning pulse weaving into a three-dimensional net that covered every movement within fifty meters of the estate, inside and out.
"Six men, in two groups. Four on the east side, two on the north. Armed. Advancing slowly."
Swordmaster Tomie opened her eyes, her voice without a ripple in it.
Before the words had finished, the palm pressed to the floor bore down, and white light spilled out.
A low hum ran through the boards.
The vibration travelling along the ground turned savage, a deep and powerful shockwave racing out along every strand of life force already threaded beneath the floor.
"Gaaah -!" "Thud!" "Crunch!"
In almost the same instant, from the estate's side wing, the rear corridor and the junction with the courtyard came muffled cries of pain, the sound of bodies dropping, and the unmistakable snap of breaking bone.
The special forces officers creeping in found the ground beneath their feet delivering, without any warning, an impact of concentrated ferocity - a sledgehammer swung up from below into ankles, shins, even knees.
In that split second the fragile bones snapped and deformed, and every one of them collapsed screaming, stripped of any ability to move.
"Grass, trees, soil, stone, water. Everything nature makes holds a very faint trace of life force of its own. Use them as a medium and you can transmit life force far more efficiently to strike with."
Swordmaster Tomie drew her hand slowly back. The thin milky haze over the ground dispersed without a trace, the floor whole again, as if nothing had happened at all.
That said, she closed her eyes once more and let her awareness stretch out along the nerve lines of the [Tomie Network].
Fragments of Amamiya Rin's surroundings came flooding in - the staircase of the Saeki house, the malice thick in the air, and on the stairs below, an esper whose Ikiryo could level a nation, and above, a Ju-on curse with the potential to end the world…
(…Troublesome.)
Through Amamiya Rin's eyes, Swordmaster Tomie met Kayako's hate-filled, furious stare at close range, and her brows knit a fraction.
She could feel it: Amamiya Rin was trying to move Kayako, to reach her. If she acted and changed something, would it set off a chain reaction and interfere with his plan?
The thought turned over. Swordmaster Tomie let go of Amamiya Rin and looked instead at the one closest to him.
That knockoff who worshipped the beauty of muscle, apparently sprinting toward Rin-kun.
Fine. Her, then.
Swordmaster Tomie wasted no more time. She drew a deep breath, and the warm, surging life force inside her stopped spreading along her skin or the ground and shifted angle, pouring instead down a far deeper channel - the invisible nerve lines connecting every Tomie.
A hum.
The faint tremor ran along the [Tomie Network], and through those invisible nerve lines Swordmaster Tomie sent out a vast, gentle current of life force.
Out on the street, Flesh-Mod Tomie, head down and running flat out, went rigid all over.
"Guh?!"
A warm, enormous flood poured into her limbs and bones without warning, like welcome rain over parched ground.
The fatigue the long run had put in her burned away in an instant. Her muscles and sinews sang with relief, and even her skin seemed to take on a healthy glow.
"Wh - what is this?!"
One flick of thought, and she traced the current to its source.
(So it can be done that way… Wait! Isn't this just the Ripple Breathing Method?)
It was not Flesh-Mod Tomie asking. It was Vampire Tomie, who had been watching the show from far off, and who was left gaping as she felt out the range of techniques Swordmaster Tomie was pulling from life force.
You have to be kidding. In a world of ghosts and curses, she'd invented the Ripple Breathing Method?
(A crude application of life force, nothing more. Third technique: transmitting life force directly through the lines between us, with no need for the Soul Reviver's Sword. That is a privilege that belongs to us.)
Swordmaster Tomie answered evenly.
The techniques she had built were similar to Vampire Tomie's Ripple Breathing Method, and yet not the same.
For one thing, transmitting the Ripple was a perfectly ordinary application within JoJo's Ripple system, whereas in this world it was the privilege of the Soul Reviver - of the Soul Reviver's Sword.
That she could pass life force along without borrowing that sword was because everyone within the [Tomie Network] shared a single organ: the cranial nerves.
All of their cranial nerves were joined together. They could be regarded entirely as one person - or rather, as one whole.
The cranial nerves and the brain - the [Tomie Network] itself - were their true body. Their individual bodies were merely limbs of that network.
(This is still the crude version…? You, this is an enormous windfall! It means anybody can pull down serious power whenever they need it!)
Flesh-Mod Tomie kept running while grinding her teeth inside her own head.
Great strength handed over for free. In that case, what had all her brutal training been for?
(It is a crude application, yes. I am a swordsman, a warrior, a Swordmaster, and I carry a sword meant for killing. What made you think this most elementary handling of energy counted as high skill?)
Swordmaster Tomie said it without hurry.
Using life force to reinforce the body. Sending life force through living matter to strike. Passing life force to Amamiya Rin through the [Tomie Network], skipping the Soul Reviver's Sword entirely.
The techniques looked marvellous, but there was nothing ingenious about them. They were breath guiding the motion of life force - the most basic exercise there was.
(Also, do you imagine every Tomie has any interest in fighting? And even if they did, why would I waste all the life force I have gathered on a useless knockoff?)
Swordmaster Tomie let out a scornful little laugh.
Something for nothing - as if she would ever let the other Tomies enjoy that privilege.
At those words, every Tomie fell silent.
Nothing to argue with. This was Tomie. What Tomie would ever hurt herself to benefit someone else? If such a Tomie existed, the rest would laugh themselves sick.
____
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