The stifling heat trapped inside the disguise eased considerably all at once. With the hood gone, the room's dim light fell directly onto her real face. Inori Yuzuriha's whole body locked up — a visceral, instinctive need to protect herself surged through her — and King Crimson tore free from her back and wheeled on the attacker, primed to strike.
Without King Crimson holding it up, the oversized men's clothing collapsed in a heap, revealing the person actually inside.
"A — a woman?"
The cry came from the attacker.
He'd only meant to see the face. He had no idea that move had just written his death sentence.
These men were the guards assigned to the inner warehouse — the section Inori had missed when she broke through. There had been a hidden partition. When they'd heard the commotion, they'd grabbed their weapons and rushed to check on their boss, only to find him crumpled on the floor with some heavily bundled figure going through his computer.
It had been pure chance.
One of them — a young man, cautious by nature, the type who opened doors without making a sound — had kept the others quiet even after seeing the boss go down. The group had crept forward in silence, and then he'd made his move: gun in one hand for cover, the other reaching out to tear the intruder's hood off.
What he'd found was nothing. Just a girl with waist-length pink hair.
"..."
— If I still had Epitaph's future-sight, this wouldn't have happened.
Inori knew she was exposed. So she stopped hiding.
She stood and let the baggy men's clothing slide off her in layers, until all that remained was her own outfit — an elegant black dress. She lifted one leg from inside the oversized boot and set it on the floor, black over-the-knee stockings against bare concrete. Her deep-crimson eyes were bottomless. Her face was porcelain-still.
She turned slowly to face them — the people who now had to die because of her own carelessness.
"How — how is she wearing something that huge — ?"
"D — don't come any closer!"
She was breathtakingly beautiful, yes. But she'd just taken out this many of their brothers on her own. No one here had the clarity to look at her with ordinary eyes.
The young man leading them kept his gun up, though his hands trembled slightly. She was just a girl who looked physically weak and harmless. Just a girl who looked barely sixteen or seventeen. All she had was the boss's handgun — and his side had five men. Open fire simultaneously and this girl died on the spot. No question.
So why — when she was just standing there — did it feel like the cold was coming from inside his own bones?
"Hey — little sister." He tried to smile, tried to keep his voice easy. "The one who took out my guys — that wasn't you, right?"
Instinct was screaming at him. Do not underestimate her.
"It was me."
"And it was my mistake." Inori stepped forward, brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes — pink ranging from pale to deep, sliding through her fingers like silk.
"Letting you see my face. That was my mistake."
"I said don't come — !"
He was quick-witted, the young man. He understood this girl wasn't what she appeared to be. The sheer nerve of walking into their stronghold alone, the absolute stillness of a person who didn't even flinch looking down five gun barrels — that wasn't normal. His plan was simple: keep her calm, get her talking, shoot her the moment she wasn't expecting it.
"You're out of options. Drop the weapon and put your hands up — and I won't make things hard for you."
"We'll take real good care of you~"
"Wait — she kind of looks like that singer who's been blowing up online lately——"
Laughter rippled through the men behind him. They lacked their leader's instincts. They thought he actually meant to take her alive.
Inori didn't seem to hear any of it.
She simply spoke.
"My name is Inori. Officially, I don't exist — no registered identity, no fixed occupation. I'm a shut-in."
"I've stolen fifty thousand yen worth of designer clothing. I've stolen ordinary students' hot dogs. When someone tried to assault me on the street, I put them in the hospital. When a competitor bought bot accounts to defame my songs online, I went to their door and taught them a lesson."
"And even someone like me——" She raised her head. One hand rested on her hip; the other extended toward them, index finger aimed like a blade. "——knows what truly vile acts look like."
"People like you — people who trample lives to serve your own greed — if I silence you, you don't get to complain about it. Do you."
"SHOOT HER — OPEN FIRE——"
He hadn't understood a word of what she'd actually said, but the pressure rolling off her made the order burst out of him before he could stop himself. The idiots behind him, though, were still lost in their daydream of capturing the pretty girl.
"What are you all doing — SHOOT — ngh——"
In the single second they hesitated, King Crimson didn't even need Time Erasure. It was simply there — directly in front of him — and drove a fist straight through his abdomen, leaving a hole the size of a forearm.
That was King Crimson's style of combat: if one hit could end it, one hit was all it used. It definitely wasn't going to go "ORA ORA."
"Sho——!"
They called out the dead man's name. It wasn't until they saw the wound — the unmistakable, gaping, real wound — that the truth finally landed. Survival instinct ignited all at once, and they raised their weapons and opened fire.
In the confined space of this room, at this range, without even aiming they would turn her into a sieve.
"King Crimson."
Inori said it quietly.
A deep, brief resonance — like a struck bell — sounded at the edge of her hearing. She stepped outside time.
The bullets maintained their trajectories and flew straight at her. But she existed outside the moment they were fired from, and they couldn't touch her. King Crimson couldn't attack in the erased-time space, and even reaching a blind spot wasn't a guaranteed clean solution — the room was too tight, the distance between her body and theirs too small. If even one of them reacted in time and fired again, it was over.
Which was why she'd thought of it in advance.
Before entering the erasure, she'd palmed the handgun.
"King Crimson cannot touch anything outside the user's body during Time Erasure."
"But anything you're holding before you enter — that counts as part of you."
Exactly as Diavolo had once splashed blood into someone's eyes to blind them — exactly as he had moved Trish under Bucciarati's nose without Bucciarati feeling a thing — whatever she made contact with before Time Erasure engaged was treated as an extension of herself, and she could use it freely in that space.
She moved at a sprint to the traffickers' backs. Timed it to the last instant before the ability released. Put a single bullet into each one of their spines, precisely placed.
The moment time resumed — the girl who should have been shredded by gunfire simply ceased to be in the space she'd occupied. An instant later, blood bloomed like fireworks across the room: four traffickers hit from behind, all of them going down.
"Hff——"
For some reason, standing over the five bodies now lying across the floor, Inori felt something loosen in her chest — the way a muscle releases after a long cramp. All the pressure that had been quietly accumulating over the past several days seemed to exhale out of her at once.
There is compassion in people. But not for those who trample other lives into the ground.
"Ngh... p — please... don't kill me..."
One of her shots had drifted just far enough. One of them was still alive — barely. The wound bled steadily, his face twisted in pain, his clothes soaked through with red. He was dragging himself toward the door, leaving a long smear of blood across the floor. Like there was something he was still holding on for.
"No vacancies."
She walked past him. King Crimson materialized beside her — and the sound of tearing flesh echoed once through the room.
Inori didn't look back. She pushed through the door and walked out, and King Crimson fell in behind her without missing a step.
> Author's Note: Doing a JoJo pose feels kind of weird~ but it's undeniably cool~