The side tunnel was a choking nightmare of smoke and heat. Yuki coughed violently, tears streaming from his eyes, stinging from the acrid fumes. The roar of the inferno in the junction behind him was a physical pressure, pushing him forward, driving him upwards. He stumbled, half-blind, his lungs burning, the raw burns on his arms throbbing in agony with every ragged breath.
He finally burst through a rusted metal door into a dimly lit maintenance corridor. The air here was cooler, cleaner, but the smell of smoke and burnt things clung to him like a shroud. He leaned against the cool concrete wall, gasping, his body trembling with exhaustion and shock.
The images flashed behind his eyelids: the fireball erupting, the Spider thrashing in flames, the exorcist wounded, the silhouettes of the homeless people screaming as they were consumed.
He'd done that. His power. His desperate act. He hadn't just disrupted the fight. He'd ignited a massacre. The weight of it settled on him, heavier than the exorcist's chains, colder than the Spider's web. He sank to the floor, burying his face in his hands. The rough concrete scraped against his skin.
They were nothing, Kage's voice whispered, cold and dismissive. Mortal vessels. Fragile. Their ends were insignificant. You survived. That is what matters.
"Insignificant?" Yuki choked out, the word tasting like ash. "They were people! I killed them!"
You acted to preserve yourself, Kage countered, its tone logical, devoid of empathy. The zealot would have destroyed you. The Spider would have consumed you. Their deaths were the cost of your continued existence. A small price.
A small price. The words echoed in the hollow spaces inside him. He remembered their screams. He remembered the way the fire had engulfed them. He remembered the exorcist's eyes, burning not just with pain, but with a cold, hard fury directed at him. He had proven the exorcist right. He was an abomination. A danger to everyone around him.
He stayed there on the floor for a long time, the hum in his bones a low, miserable thrum. The physical pain was immense, but the psychological agony was worse. He was cracking. Not just the concrete walls around him, but the fragile shell of his humanity. The cracks were spreading.
Finally, driven by a need to escape the scene of his unwitting massacre, he pushed himself up. He needed to get out of the undercity. To surface. To disappear.
He followed the maintenance corridor upwards, his movements slow, stiff. He emerged through a service hatch into a deserted alley behind a row of industrial buildings. The late afternoon sun was low, casting long shadows. The city's noise was a distant hum. He was out.
But he wasn't safe.
He leaned against the brick wall, taking deep breaths of the relatively clean air. He looked down at his hands. They were grimy, covered in soot and grime from the tunnels. The burns on his arms were angry, weeping, the black scars around them pulsing faintly. He felt… hollowed out. Scoured clean, not by the exorcist's light, but by his own actions.
He closed his eyes. He saw Hana's ghost. Not as she usually appeared – wounded, silent, pointing. But as she had been in life. Smiling. Laughing. Alive. The image was so vivid, so painful, it felt like a physical blow.
"Hana," he whispered, the name catching in his throat. "I'm so sorry."
He felt a cold breeze, though the air was still. He opened his eyes.
Hana's ghost stood before him.
But it was wrong.
Her form was faint, almost transparent, but the details were horrifyingly clear. Her school uniform was shredded and stained, not just with shadow, but with what looked like soot and blood. Her empty sockets wept thick, black tears that sizzled when they hit the pavement, releasing tiny wisps of smoke. Her mouth was open in a silent scream, but it wasn't just the usual expression of agony. It was stretched wider, impossibly wide, the corners cracking like dry earth.
And she wasn't looking at him. She was looking through him, towards the alley wall.
Yuki turned slowly, dread coiling in his gut.
The alley wall was cracked. Not just old, weathered cracks, but fresh, deep fissures that spread across the brick like a spiderweb. And from within those cracks… things moved.
Not insects. Not rats.
Fingers.
Pale, skeletal fingers, clawing at the edges of the cracks, as if trying to push through. Dozens of them. Hundreds. They twitched and scrabbled silently.
Yuki stumbled back a step, his heart hammering. "What…?"
Hana's ghost flickered violently. Her head snapped towards him, her empty sockets locking onto his face. The silent scream seemed to intensify, becoming a psychic pressure that made his teeth ache. She pointed a trembling, translucent finger, not at the wall, but at him.
Then, she began to change.
Her form seemed to melt, to flow like wax. The shredded uniform blurred, the weeping black tears spreading, coating her form like oil. Her limbs elongated, becoming thin and spidery. Her head distorted, the cracked mouth stretching wider, revealing not darkness, but rows upon rows of tiny, needle-sharp teeth.
She was becoming one of them. One of the things in the wall.
Yuki cried out, stumbling back further. "No! Hana! Stop!"
But the transformation continued. Her ghostly form became a shifting, shadowy mass, vaguely humanoid but composed of writhing darkness and those terrible, needle-filled teeth. It flowed towards him, not walking, but seeping across the pavement, leaving a trail of sizzling black tears.
The fingers in the wall scrabbled faster, the cracks widening. More things pressed against the fissures from the other side – distorted faces, eyes wide with silent terror, mouths open in screams that made no sound.
Yuki pressed himself against the opposite wall, trapped between the advancing shadow-thing that had been his sister and the wall cracking open to reveal a pocket dimension of silent, screaming torment.
He raised his hands, focusing on the scars, on the hum. Burn!
Crimson energy flared, weak, flickering. It struck the advancing shadow-thing.
It didn't stop it. The shadow-thing absorbed the crimson energy, just like the Spider's web had. It pulsed with a deeper darkness, flowing faster. The needle-filled teeth seemed to grin.
The cracks in the wall widened further. A hand, pale and skeletal, pushed all the way through, reaching towards Yuki.
He was trapped. The horror he'd unwittingly unleashed in the junction had cracked something inside him, and now that crack was opening, letting the darkness pour in. The wall between worlds was breaking, and Hana's ghost was becoming the key.
He closed his eyes, waiting for the cold touch of the skeletal hand, the bite of the needle teeth. The hum in his bones was a frantic, terrified scream. The cracks weren't just in the concrete. They were in him. And they were about to break wide open.