Utaha trudged along the dim, deserted street, exhausted. She hadn't been in a good state lately.
On one hand, she kept thinking about her benefactor and respected teacher, Tatsuki. Recently, she had finally found this teacher who had once helped her.
Only to discover he didn't seem to be the person she'd imagined.
He looked like someone who didn't care about otaku subculture at all, claimed the works with his name on them weren't really his.
He also seemed to be a scumbag two-timer with way too many feet in way too many boats—Case in point: that very intimate moment with junior Benio, then dragging two girls who weren't Benio around Comiket and calling them his girlfriends.
On top of that, he felt like a perverted troll with twisted tastes.
That outrageous doujin, for example. Even she was too embarrassed to say its contents out loud.
Faced with a benefactor-senpai image so utterly different from what she'd pictured, she'd gone back and reread her old chat logs with Tatsuki over and over.
Yet she still couldn't accept that there was such a huge gap between "Tatsuki" and "Unheard Flower." It was beyond anything she'd imagined.
The huge, violent sense of disillusion clogged her chest.
Add to that her daily manuscript grind, and her editor Sonoko Machida's constant nagging.
Today was one of the "summoned for a scolding" days—Utaha had just been chewed out again.
Her body was tired. Her mind was in tatters. Her head was full of Tatsuki, doujins, drafts, and Sonoko—those few words bounced around in her skull nonstop.
So much so that she never even noticed the long-haired woman walking right beside her muttering under her breath… Or the bearded man staggering toward them from up ahead.
The surroundings had gone deathly silent. Only distant insect chirps and the wind underscored just how quiet the night was.
Suddenly, Utaha felt a chill crawl up her spine from behind.
Bang!
The heavy thud of bodies colliding yanked her out of her thoughts.
She lifted her lashes and saw a purple-haired woman and the bearded man facing each other.
Under the streetlight, everything between them fell right into her line of sight.
The man's eyes were empty, his expression vacant. The woman was thin, her face deathly pale. They'd apparently just bumped into each other.
Neither offered even the most basic apology. They both just lowered their heads in silence.
Utaha's brows knit. This was not the kind of scene you wanted to walk straight through.
She deliberately angled sideways, ready to slip past them from the side.
As she stepped by their shoulders, though, she suddenly snapped her head toward them—because she heard muttering.
The bearded man was mumbling, "Eat… eat… eat…"
The purple-haired woman was whispering, "I… am… human…"
Utaha held her breath. The scene was way too unnerving, and paired with the pitch-black, dead-silent street around them, a wave of cold rose from the soles of her feet right up to the crown of her head.
Her heart started to crawl. An uneasiness began to build.
Her first thought was that she'd run into two mentally unstable people. She clenched the strap of her bag, about to hurry away from there.
But at that exact instant, the bearded man tilted his head back, eyes dull, and shouted:
"I'm gonna eat people!!!"
Eat people!
That line seemed to snap something in the purple-haired woman. The impulse she'd been desperately suppressing burst out instead. Her features twisted as she screamed.
"I'm a ghoul! I'm not human!"
The last shred of sanity was drowned.
In the blink of an eye, the woman's eyes turned black-and-crimson. Weird blood-red veins spidered out around her eye sockets.
She hunched her back, fingers pulled so tight they looked ready to seize something and tear.
"!!!"
Utaha was so startled by their sudden inhuman outbursts that she instinctively took a step back. She had no idea what was going on with these two. All she could think was that two mentally ill people had snapped right in front of her.
She was still wavering over whether she should call the police when the scene changed again.
A low, guttural growl rolled through the air.
Utaha's expression shifted from uncertain vigilance to outright, wide-eyed terror.
Her long legs, wrapped in black stockings, weren't doing their usual lazy little bounce. They were trembling from pure fear.
Right before her eyes—horizontal cracks split across the bearded man's head. There wasn't a single drop of blood. Everything attached to his nose, eyes, and ears writhed and separated in an eerie, creeping motion.
In just a few seconds, everything above his mouth was gone. The entire upper half of his head had turned into two flesh-colored tentacles like whips, squirming and twisting.
Along the sides of the Fleshy Whip-Things were rows of razor-sharp teeth, and on their tips gleamed blades catching the faint streetlight.
Where his skull had opened up, above his mouth, there was no brain at all.
That's not a man. That's a monster!
Cold sweat soaked through Utaha's clothes. Her legs turned to jelly and she stumbled back again and again, only managing to steady herself when her back hit the wall.
She thought the monster the man had turned into would kill or eat the woman on the spot. But she'd judged wrong. Something even more horrifying happened.
The purple-haired woman in glasses—on her lower back, under her clothes—suddenly began to bulge in a grotesque rhythm, as if something underneath was about to burst out.
The thought had barely formed in Utaha's mind when it came true.
Riiip!
Cloth tearing.
Something really did tear through the fabric at her lower back and burst out. Four blood-red… tails, lined with tiny scales like barbed lances, tore out of her body.
Just like the man's flesh-whip blades, they flexed and twisted with terrifying agility.
"I'll eat you!"
The brainless monster-man yelled dully from his dangling mouth, his body rooted in place—even as the flesh-whip blades screamed through the air, lashing toward the female monster.
If those blades slashed anyone at that speed, they'd absolutely be sliced clean in half.
In that life-or-death moment…
The woman's hair flew wildly. The scaled, spear-sharp tails on her back drew back, muscles coiling.
As they contracted, they gathered power—then shot out like arrows.
The man-monster's flesh-whip blades were clearly faster, but his body never moved. The female monster's scaled tails were clearly tougher, but just a hair slower. However, she could plant those tails into the ground and walls to vault herself around, darting with brutal speed.
On the surface, it looked like an evenly matched clash. In reality, the woman was steadily closing in on her target.
When she slid into the perfect range to strike, she would launch a killing blow.
Utaha stared at the two terrifying humanoid monsters and felt her soul flee her body. Her strength completely left her, and she collapsed limply to the ground.
A surge of pure terror surged up from her core, drowning her.
Thump-thump-thump!!
Her heart thundered in her chest, utterly beyond her control. Her breathing turned ragged, to the point she could hardly get air. Cold sweat ran down her forehead in rivulets.
Her trembling thighs, wrapped in stockings, pressed together—and deep beneath her skirt, the gate she normally held tightly shut snapped wide open.
A shockwave of scalding heat blasted through that breached barrier, and warm liquid slid down along the black nylon clinging to her legs.
Under normal circumstances, she'd be suffocating in shame and humiliation. Right now, she couldn't spare it a single thought.
She didn't dare make a sound—not a gasp, not a whimper—for fear the slightest noise would draw the monsters' attention.
The two creatures' attacks blurred into streaks.
Scales and blades collided with crisp clang-clang-clangs like metal on metal. Streetlights were chopped down, the asphalt split open, signposts were toppled, walls smashed to rubble.
What drove Utaha into utter despair was—despite all this noise and destruction…
No one noticed.
Not a single person came.
....
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