Just as Sakayanagi Arisu had predicted — things were not going well on Ryuuen Kakeru's end.
To put it plainly... they were going catastrophically.
Two minutes earlier.
At the far end of the corridor, when they finally came face to face with the last ordinary spirit, Ryuuen hadn't rushed in for the kill. Instead, he'd seized the initiative — snatching the Y-GUN he'd borrowed from Shiina Hiyori and firing a capture net that locked the spirit firmly in place.
"As long as we keep this thing pinned without finishing it off, the exam won't end," he said.
"Use the time. Find the hidden boss. If we can take it down, we score big. If we can't — we kill this spirit and call it a night."
Advance if you can, retreat if you must. The logic was airtight. The plan was perfect.
And then, in the exact instant the laser rope snapped taut and the captured spirit was still sizzling and writhing in the bonds—
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Footsteps. Abrupt and out of place, echoing down the dead silence of the old school building's corridor.
Everyone turned toward the sound.
From the shadowed corner not far away, a middle-aged man in a cheap suit stepped out — average face, unremarkable build — strolling forward as casually as if he were out for an evening walk.
He glanced at the bound spirit. Then at the students holding their strange weapons. A flicker of confusion passed through his clouded, flat eyes.
"Hm..."
The man stopped. He stood perfectly still, speaking to no one in particular.
"Interesting. This time there's no invisible wall blocking my path."
"Is that because of you people?"
He raised his head.
Those dead-fish eyes — dull, flat, completely devoid of any inner light — stared straight at them.
"Hey. Can someone explain this to me?"
"Where exactly... is this place?"
Staring at the man who looked, by every external measure, like an utterly ordinary office drone — Shiranami Chihiro and Shiina Hiyori, experiencing all of this for the first time, went completely still. A dozen questions crowded into their minds at once.
Is this exam... pulling in random bystanders now?
A teacher? A janitor who wandered in by mistake?
Neither of them said a word.
Because the veterans standing beside them had already changed — their entire presence, their body language, their aura — shifting in an instant into something else entirely.
Katsuragi Kohei's hand clamped down on his black weapon. A bead of cold sweat appeared at his temple.
Ichinose Honami and Ryuuen Kakeru locked eyes — and read the exact same answer in each other's gaze.
That eerie, inhuman calm.
Those eyes that looked at human beings the way a person might look at a loaf of bread.
It was identical — identical — to the monster they had encountered in the convenience store during the last exam.
"Found it."
No hesitation. No need to exchange a single word.
Ryuuen Kakeru snapped the Y-GUN up before it had even finished lowering, trained the barrel on the man's torso, and squeezed the trigger without a heartbeat's pause.
"Die, monster!"
His logic was clean and simple: the Parasyte's tendrils were blindingly fast — close-quarters combat meant instant death. But if the laser rope could pin it in place, even for just a few seconds, the X-GUNs in Ichinose's and Katsuragi's hands would be more than enough to blow the thing into dust.
"Watch out — it's not human!"
Ichinose's warning rang out as both she and Katsuragi began charging their weapons in sync.
The response was flawless. The timing was perfect.
And then — the way it always goes — everything went wrong in the smallest, most overlooked gap.
Whirr——
The Y-GUN in Ryuuen's hands did not fire a second capture net.
Instead, several beams of scanning light — like barcode readers — swept across the bound spirit still thrashing at their side.
Like a scan reversing into a print job.
The spirit was transmitted away, dissolving from the top down, and vanished entirely.
That was the Y-GUN's hidden function?
Ryuuen's pupils contracted.
The others reacted with equal shock.
Shiina Hiyori and Shiranami Chihiro scrambled to raise their weapons the moment they heard Ichinose's warning. Ichinose and Katsuragi were already mid-charge.
But that window — a second, maybe two — was nothing to an ordinary human being. A blink. A stumble.
To a living weapon whose every instinct was built around killing...
It was more than enough.
"I don't know what any of this is."
The muscles of the middle-aged man's face twitched — a grotesque, stuttering spasm.
"But if there's hostility..."
"Then I'll just clean it up."
Before the eyes of the horror-struck newcomers, the man's skull split open like a blooming flower — and both arms cracked apart at the sides, unfolding into a fan of razor-edged blades.
SLASH.
The air screamed as something tore through it.
"GET BACK!!"
Ryuuen Kakeru bellowed — and he and Katsuragi Kohei threw themselves backward in the same instant, moving on pure reflex.
Even their limit-pushing reactions weren't enough. The bone-blades moved like lightning — and left deep, bone-exposing gashes across their arms and thighs before either man had fully cleared the strike zone.
They were the lucky ones.
"AH——!!"
Shiranami Chihiro and Shiina Hiyori — standing in the back row, with no combat training whatsoever — didn't even manage to finish their screams.
They had been fully on guard. They had their weapons in hand.
It didn't matter.
Two tendrils drove straight through their chests and abdomens without slowing down.
There was no flood of blood, no prolonged horror — the Black Sphere's death-protection protocol triggered at the threshold of death, doing its job.
Blue light flashed.
The two girls vanished where they stood, leaving behind only a spreading pool of crimson on the floor — the only proof that they had ever been there at all.
"CHIHIRO!!!"
Watching her best friend die right in front of her eyes, Ichinose Honami let out a sound that came from somewhere deep and broken.
She had survived the killing blow — but only barely. More than half of one shoulder had been sheered clean away. Blood soaked the entire left side of her body in an instant.
And yet — this girl who was soft and warm in every ordinary moment — showed something terrifying in this one.
She did not fall back. She did not cry out.
In those eyes that were usually so gentle, a fire ignited.
"DIE!!!"
She aimed for the Parasyte's head.
At that same moment, Katsuragi Kohei — steadying himself against the wall — completed his charge.
BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG.
Six gravity-wave rounds detonated in the narrow corridor.
The Parasyte was still retracting its tendrils. It had no time to dodge.
The raw kinetic force obliterated its skull — and the entire left half of its body detonated into a spray of pulverized flesh.
A rain of gore fell across the corridor.
In the corner, the bound spirit had already been transported away by the Y-GUN's scan. Whatever its destination was, it was gone.
[Target eliminated.]
[Mission complete.]
The cold system chime rang out.
"Hah... hah..."
Ichinose Honami crumpled to the floor, breathing in ragged, heaving gasps. The dopamine flooding her brain was the only thing keeping the agony of her wound at bay.
"Is it... over...?"
She stared blankly at the wreckage strewn across the floor.
Dead?
Chihiro... and the others... and this thing...
It was at that moment that rapid footsteps came pounding around the corner.
Horikita Suzune burst into view, breathless.
What greeted her was not a victory celebration.
It was blood-soaked floors. Downed allies. And a puddle of visceral carnage that made her stomach lurch.
"This..."
Horikita Suzune pulled up short. Her face went white as paper.
Too late?
And it was this... brutal?
A surge of bitter self-reproach flooded through her.
She had run here for the kill. For the score.
And now she hadn't done a single thing — just arrived in time to witness the aftermath of a massacre.
Horikita slammed her fist against the wall.
If she'd been a little faster. If she hadn't hesitated—
"STOP STANDING THERE — IT'S NOT OVER!!"
A raw, ragged bellow tore through the corridor.
Ryuuen Kakeru — who had never once taken his eyes off the remains — felt his pupils slam shut.
"Its right hand — IT'S STILL MOVING!!"
Everyone whipped around.
Within the pile of ruined flesh, the one intact right hand twitched. Then — as if possessed of its own will — it detached itself entirely from the destroyed torso and compressed into an independent, pulsating mass of slime.
"It's not dead! Finish it off — NOW!!"
Katsuragi Kohei and Ichinose Honami lurched for their triggers.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
Damn it.
The X-GUNs were drained. The six-round volley had burned through every last joule of stored charge. The targeting rings were flashing red in frantic warning, cycling through their recharge sequence.
Horikita Suzune saw it — saw the transmission light already climbing past her chest — and didn't think. She raised her black weapon first.
"I've got it!"
But she was too slow.
Three seconds to charge. Three seconds was a lifetime to a Parasyte.
The flesh-mass coiled — and launched itself like a striking viper, hurtling straight toward the nearest target: Ichinose Honami, already the most critically wounded person in the corridor.
It was going to possess her.
It was going to survive.
"No..."
Watching that grotesque mass of flesh hurtle toward her, Ichinose Honami's eyes filled with despair.
Her barrel was still cooling. Her body refused to move.
Was this it?
Like Chihiro...
And then, in that razor-thin sliver between one heartbeat and the next—
"Hah..."
"Sorry about this. Looks like I don't have a choice."
A sound split the air.
Fwish——
A dark streak — black as a lightning bolt — flashed past Ichinose's ear, close enough to sever a strand of her hair.
And then.
The mass of Parasyte flesh — milliseconds from burrowing into Ichinose's open wound — was intercepted mid-air with pinpoint precision, pinned dead in its trajectory, and flung backward with tremendous kinetic force.
THUD.
A dull, final impact.
The Parasyte was nailed to the concrete wall on the opposite side of the corridor — impaled, stuck fast, going nowhere.
Ichinose Honami swallowed hard. She turned her head, stiff and slow.
And only then did she see it: the black combat blade in Chris's hand — the weapon that had crossed the entire length of the hallway and stopped a monster in its tracks.
No. Blade wasn't the right word anymore.
It was more like a spear. A black lance of infinite extension — drawn like a bold stroke of ink across a sheet of white paper, spanning the full length of the corridor, hanging between life and death.
Their eyes met.
His gaze was unreadable. His pupils were a deep, quiet blue — sharp with the faintest edge of warning, cold and clear, brilliant as distant stars.
Ichinose opened her mouth to say something — anything.
The transmission light had already swallowed her voice.
——End of Chapter——
Author's Note:
One thing I wasn't sure about: in the Parasyte lore, if a Parasyte fails to possess its target, it permanently fuses with the cells of that body part instead. Migi, for instance, became a right hand because he failed to take over the brain. So — when that host dies and the Parasyte goes looking for a new one, is it locked into only being able to possess a right hand?
I couldn't find a clear answer. Asked an AI — got one answer. Asked a different one — got a completely different answer.
For the purposes of this story, I've gone with the rule that the possession site is fixed. That's why the detached hand doesn't go after Ichinose's brain — it's locked into hand-level possession only.
Also worth noting: in the original work, Goto-type composite Parasytes were lab-created biological weapons. The Black Sphere's technology is clearly more advanced than Tamura Reiko's era, so a 3-in-1 fused into 2 configuration is well within the realm of possibility. This is a setting decision made for plot purposes.
Finally — this chapter made the recommendation list! Please follow along and add it to your reading list if you're enjoying it — that really does mean a lot to me!
orz
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