"You think... you think I'd be grateful to you for this? You think! That I'd be grateful to Hinako for this? You think! Hinako would be happy that I'm the only one who survived, that I had to watch my kin get slaughtered right in front of me?"
Tsuneki Hisayuki's voice was hoarse, his eyes bloodshot, his chest heaving violently.
He glared at Flesh-Mod Tomie, every hair on his body standing on end, his crimson slit pupils reflecting the corpses scattered across the ground and the blood-soaked woman before him.
He knew Hinako! Hinako would never be someone like that!
If it were Hinako, she'd surely consider his feelings — she'd let the now-harmless fox spirit clan return to the mountains and forests.
Flesh-Mod Tomie stood where she was, tilting her head to look at him, the way one might watch a rat still twitching with its tail pinned underfoot.
"What are you even talking about?"
She tilted her head further, the corner of her mouth curling slowly upward into a delighted smile.
There was not a shred of warmth in that smile — only a pure, almost childlike malice.
"I couldn't care less about your feelings, and I care even less what Hinako thinks."
She took a step forward, her boot splashing a small ripple of dark red across the pool of blood.
"If anything, if Hinako's unhappy about this, I'll be quite happy. Hee hee hee hee!"
Tsuneki Hisayuki froze.
He saw an expression cross that face that he had never seen before.
It was pure delight — the kind of genuine, heartfelt joy that comes from watching someone else suffer. Nothing to do with anger, nothing to do with hatred — just a cruelty as artless as a child's.
"Why!? Why?! Aren't you Ultraseven's helper? Would Ultraseven allow you to do something like this?"
Tsuneki Hisayuki's voice began to shake.
"Why?"
Flesh-Mod Tomie echoed the question flippantly.
"Who told her to become that person's human host, hm? She isn't even a Tomie, and yet she gets to stand closer to him than any Tomie ever could... It really pisses me off."
Little by little, Flesh-Mod Tomie's expression twisted into something feral.
Because Hinako had become Amamiya Rin's human host.
Because that country girl, that painfully ordinary girl, had somehow ended up closer to him than she was.
Why should she get to? A plain, mediocre little nobody!
"So I thought — if I did something that made her unhappy, would I end up happy? Worth a try, right?"
Flesh-Mod Tomie's words dripped with naked malice.
"And it turns out... yeah, it feels pretty good."
No matter which Tomie it was, no matter how different she seemed on the surface from the other Tomies, no matter how much her personality and appearance had diverged from Kawakami Tomie's original form —
Kawakami Tomie was, in the end, always Kawakami Tomie: the living embodiment of every malice ever attributed to women — vanity, arrogance, jealousy, selfishness, cruelty, fickleness — the darkest corners of human nature magnified without limit within her.
"You..."
A chill ran through Tsuneki Hisayuki's whole body.
In that instant, the night wind around them seemed to congeal into cold jelly. The reek of blood soaking the ground thickened, turned rank, and the moment it invaded his nostrils, it felt as though countless tiny tendrils had crawled up through his airway and into his skull, scrambling what little reason he had left.
"You don't need to worry about Ultraman, either." Flesh-Mod Tomie's voice carried supreme confidence. "He won't blame me for this."
"Because what I killed wasn't human — it was a monster that endangers humans. Even if he found out what I was thinking, he'd just sigh and let it go. He wouldn't do anything to me."
Tomie was a woman both clever and foolish — but when she wanted to, even with a head full of muscle, she knew exactly how far she could push things.
Tsuneki Hisayuki stared blankly at the blood-soaked Flesh-Mod Tomie before him, his vision beginning to twist uncontrollably.
The figure drenched in blood standing in front of him was no longer the human woman he'd briefly interacted with — she had become something else entirely, an unnameable mass of malice.
That face, still wearing its innocent smile, seemed to shed its human skin, revealing the grotesque shape hidden beneath — pure malice, a twisted soul, nothing more.
Her flippant, venomous words no longer sounded like clear human speech; they'd become a chaotic, formless murmur scraping against his nerves.
Everything he'd spent over a decade building — his understanding of humanity, his devotion as a member of the fox spirit clan — shattered like fragile glass before this malice that was pure to the point of having no logic at all.
Tsuneki Hisayuki's consciousness felt as though it were falling into a boundless, chaotic abyss. In his ears, the dying screams of his kinsmen tangled with Tomie's mocking laughter; before his eyes, endless crimson and twisted malice coiled together. His once-clear sense of self blurred, his half-human half-fox body trembled uncontrollably, and somewhere deep in his soul came the faint sound of cracking, plunging him into thick confusion and despair.
"Kill me."
All at once, Tsuneki Hisayuki's voice went flat and calm, still as stagnant water.
"Since you enjoy killing so much, then kill me too."
"Kill you? No, no, no, I think you've gotten something wrong."
Flesh-Mod Tomie shook her head, saying it as though it were nothing.
"My hobby isn't killing people — it's working out. So stop saying pointless things like that. You need to live, and live well, as the last of the Tsuneki family, for as long as you can."
She paused, as if mulling over something amusing, then suddenly laughed.
"Oh, right — let's change your name. How about Baltan? It sounds like it suits you perfectly."
"You—!"
Tsuneki Hisayuki's claws dug into his own palms, blood dripping down through his crimson fur.
"Also, don't even think about suicide."
Flesh-Mod Tomie cut him off, saying it cheerfully.
"We do have ways of bringing people back, you know. Even if you die, we can drag you right back. So—"
She patted Tsuneki Hisayuki on the shoulder — not hard, but his legs went weak, and he nearly dropped to his knees.
"Just keep living like this, in all this pain. Heh heh heh heh."
Flesh-Mod Tomie withdrew her hand and turned, walking toward the worship hall, her steps light, as though she'd just finished doing something delightful.
Tsuneki Hisayuki stood rooted to the spot, trembling all over, watching that woman's back vanish into the shadows of the hall — and found he didn't even have the courage left to move.
Inside the worship hall, Mara Tomie leaned against a corridor pillar, Amamiya Rin resting against her shoulder, his breathing steady, fast asleep.
One arm cradled Amamiya Rin's body; her other hand rested at her chest, fingers idly twirling a loose strand of hair that had fallen across it.
Flesh-Mod Tomie stepped into the worship hall, her boots leaving a trail of dark red footprints on the stone floor.
Mara Tomie looked at her, the courtyard's bloody glow reflected in her eyes, the corners of her lips curving into a beautiful arc.
"Good work."
She said it softly, her voice soft as melted honey.
Igarashi Sakuko shrank back into the shadows behind them, watching the blood-drenched Flesh-Mod Tomie, watching the courtyard littered with corpses, her stomach churning.
This was Ultraman's helper? Ultraseven's companion?
Her mind buzzed with static.
The radiant form of Ultraseven surfaced in her thoughts, while that flippant laughter still echoed in her ears, tangled together with the image of the killing she'd just witnessed, until her mind was a chaotic blur.
____
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