Chapter 188: As long as it's alive, I'll kill anything I See

At nightfall,

Surrounded by dense darkness, not even the sound of footsteps could be heard in the corridors today.

In the calmness of the night, resembling a tranquil lake hidden deep in the mountains, Shiki Ryougi reminisced about the conversation with the woman who claimed to be a speech therapist.

No, to be precise, only the last sentence.

"Why did SHIKI choose to disappear instead of me?"

The one who could answer this question, SHIKI, was no longer there.

Why did he disappear? What did he exchange, and why did he have to vanish?

Unlike Shiki, who controlled the body for the majority of the time, SHIKI liked to dream and often fell into a deep sleep for that purpose. However, even the act of dreaming, which he enjoyed, was abandoned, and he died on that rainy night.

The self that she could no longer meet, the self she could never see from the beginning. The person named SHIKI was the true self...

Shiki's consciousness grew increasingly blurred.

While wanting to understand what SHIKI had come up with, it was only a journey of retracing memories.

The door to the hospital room opened.

Slow, sluggish footsteps gradually approached.

Was it a nurse? No, it was already past midnight.

If it was a visitor, then...

At that moment, a human hand wrapped around Shiki's neck. The cold palm tightened gradually as if trying to break Shiki's cervical bone.

"Ah."

The pressure on Shiki's neck made her gasp for breath.

Unable to breathe, her throat constricted. If things continued like this, the hand strangling her would break her neck before she lost the ability to breathe.

Shiki stared at the figure with her unseen eyes.

...Not... human.

No, the shape was human. However, the person pinning her down and choking her was no longer alive.

A dead person, driven by an unknown force, attacked Shiki on the bed.

The force choking her neck showed no signs of letting up. Although Shiki resisted by grabbing the assailant's hands, the difference in strength was evident.

Wait, isn't this what I wanted?

Struggling to breathe, her face turning red, Shiki ceased her resistance.

Being killed like this wouldn't be so bad. Even if she continued to live, it would be meaningless. There was no sense of being alive, yet the pain still existed. It would be better to disappear directly.

The force grew stronger.

In reality, only a few seconds had passed, but time seemed to slow down significantly, flowing sluggishly like rubber.

The dead person choked Shiki's neck, their hand devoid of warmth, their fingers sinking into her throat like wood.

There was no mercy in this act of murder, no will from the very beginning.

The skin on the neck split open, and the flowing blood was the undeniable evidence that she was still alive.

Dead... dead just like SHIKI... Lost life.

Lost? That word forcefully brought Shiki's consciousness back.

Suddenly, a doubt arose.

Did he, in the end, find joy in dying?

Yes, he shouldn't have thought that way.

Regardless of the reasons, did his consciousness truly exist within it?

He shouldn't have sought death.

Because... death is so lonely and worthless.

Death is so dark and repulsive.

Death is more terrifying than anything else.

"I'm sorry."

In an instant, vitality surged through Shiki's body.

She grabbed the wrists of the dead person with both hands and kicked with a single leg towards their abdomen.

"I... I feel disgusted just thinking about falling into that kind of place...!"

She kicked desperately at that lump of flesh. The hands of the dead, covered in skin and blood, released her neck.

Shiki climbed off the bed.

The dead immediately lunged at her.

In the dimly lit hospital room, the living and the dead wrestled with each other.

The dead body was that of a grown man, towering over Shiki. No matter how hard she tried, Shiki was at a disadvantage.

With her hands held tightly, Shiki kept retreating until she quickly hit the wall in the narrow room.

At the moment of impact with the wall, Shiki prepared herself and consciously turned her back toward the window, her escape route.

This strategy was devised at the beginning of the battle.

The problem was—this was the third floor, about ten meters above the ground.

"Don't hesitate."

Telling herself this, Shiki released her grip on the dead person's hands.

The dead person reached for her neck. Faster than that, Shiki used her free hand to open the window. And so, the two of them tumbled outside, entangled with each other.

In the instant of their descent.

Shiki grabbed hold of the dead person's clavicle and flung him downward. Now, it was the dead person facing the ground, while Shiki maintained her position above. The ground quickly approached.

Blindfolded, Shiki jumped without hesitation. Even though she couldn't see, her instincts remained accurate.

The corpse of the dead person crashed into the flower bed in front of the hospital building, while Shiki's body, before hitting the ground, leaped horizontally and slid to the courtyard some distance away.

Amid the swirling dust, a young girl dressed in a patient's gown landed on all fours. Despite executing a landing technique she had never accomplished before, Shiki's limbs were still paralyzed under the weight of gravity.

The night remained silent and undisturbed as if nothing had happened.

Shiki lay prostrate on the cold, hard ground, motionless, only feeling the pain in her throat.

"Ah... I'm still alive."

And... that dead person was still not dead.

Since she didn't want to die, it was clear what she should do—kill before being killed.

Just thinking that made the emptiness in her chest disappear. At the same time, various emotions gradually faded away.

"What a bother."

Muttering to herself, Shiki realized.

The answer was so simple, and she had been troubled by it for such a long time. She truly was a fool.

Just then, a familiar voice came from behind Shiki.

"You startled me. Are you a cat?"

Without turning around, Shiki endured the impact of landing.

"It's you. Why are you here?"

In response to Shiki's question, the self-proclaimed magus and life advisor replied in a bored tone.

"Because I have to monitor you, and I thought it was about time something happened, so I came to try my luck. Hey, no time to rest. Whether it's a hospital or not, you can still find usable corpses. Those guys can only exert their power by possessing something tangible, so I plan to use a corpse to kill you and then possess it."

"Whether it's this or that, you're the one who set up the pawns, right?"

Shiki, still prostrated on the ground, spoke. The previous confusion had vanished like dust in the wind.

"Oh, you already figured it out? Hmm, that was indeed my mistake. Although I created a bounded field to prevent spirits from entering, it found a way around it by borrowing a body. Normally, those guys shouldn't possess that kind of intelligence."

Touko smiled cheerfully.

"Well, you better come up with a solution quickly."

"Understood."

With a snap of her fingers, Touko ignited a cigarette, and the flame formed words in mid-air.

The words overlapped with the body of the deceased, like a projection.

From a distant location formed by a straight line, the magic inscription from a distant world resonated, suddenly—the body of the fallen person lying on the ground burst into flames.

"It seems that the simple F-Rune power is not enough," Touko muttered to herself.

The deceased, surrounded by flames, slowly stood up. Despite having broken legs, it could still walk, seemingly controlling its feet with just its muscles. It swayed unsteadily as it approached Shiki.

Before long, the flames disappeared.

"Hey... you scammer."

"Calm down. Destroying a human body is quite difficult. For a living person, burning the heart can solve the problem. But it doesn't work for the deceased because they're already dead, so it doesn't matter if they lose a hand or lose their head. The level of violence from a handgun is incapable of eradicating humanity, you understand? To make it stop, you can only prepare firepower on the scale of a crematorium or seek out an expert in exorcism... Seriously, why hasn't that guy come yet? He could easily destroy this thing."

"In other words, you can't do it."

Her words seemed to inflict great trauma on Touko.

"You can't do it either. Because the dead are already dead, so you can't kill them. Unfortunately, with the weapons I have at hand, I can kill people but can't make them disappear. It's best to leave this place."

Touko stepped back, but Shiki didn't move.

It wasn't because she had fractured her foot from falling three stories.

She simply laughed mockingly.

"Whether it's dead or whatever. Since it can move, it still means it's 'alive.' As long as it's something alive—"

She stood up from a prone position, assuming the posture of a predator, a carnivore approaching its prey.

She touched her own throat.

Blood was flowing, the skin was torn, and the marks of strangulation remained.

But she was still alive.

That feeling was bewildering.

"No matter what it is, I'll show you by killing it!"

Gently, she unwrapped the bandage covering her eyes. In the darkness, the Eyes of Direct Death were there.

Her slender feet touched the ground.

As Shiki ran towards her, the undead extended their arms.

Just like tearing a piece of paper, Shiki tore apart the undead with a single hand.

Starting from the right shoulder, her hand emerged from her left waist, with her finger bones twisted into several pieces. But in exchange, the dead suffered damage several times or even tens of times worse.

The dead fell to the ground as if the strings controlling them had been cut. Even so, it seemed that only the left wrist was entangled by the strings, and the fallen undead grabbed Shiki's ankle.

Without hesitation, Shiki crushed that wrist with her foot.

"It's just a collective of 'death.' Get away from me."

Shiki sneered.

Alive. Before, she was only deceiving her own heart, but now she could feel the real sensation of being alive.

"Shiki!"

Touko called out the girl's name and threw something towards her.

It was a silver short knife, devoid of any decorations.

Shiki pulled out the short knife embedded in the ground and looked down at the motionless undead like a mantis.

And so, she stabbed the short knife into the throat of the undead.

The undead trembled for a moment and then went still.

But...

"You fool, if you want to kill, stab the original!"

Faster than Touko's reprimand, a transformation occurred.

In the instant Shiki stabbed the body, a mist flew out from within the corpse. The mist desperately tried to escape, disappearing into Shiki's body.

"..."

Shiki knelt on the ground.

Previously, they couldn't possess her due to Shiki's consciousness, but taking advantage of her momentary abandonment of self during the exhilaration of killing, they invaded her body.

"Not thorough enough, you idiot."

Touko ran over.

However, Shiki made a gesture with her body.

It meant to stay away, so Touko halted her steps.

With both hands gripping the short knife, Shiki pointed the blade toward her chest. With a strong determination, she reclaimed the vacant look in her eyes.

Her teeth firmly bit down on her lip.

The blade's tip touched her chest.

Her will and body pressed the restless spirits, leaving them with no escape.

"There's no running away like this."

She said it, not directed at anyone, but to herself.

Shiki stared directly at the wriggling foreign entity within her, piercing through her flesh. However, she was merely killing the unwanted foreign object, and Shiki was certain that the blade wouldn't harm her.

So, she infused strength into her hands.

"I... will kill the weak version of myself. I will never hand over the Mystic Eyes of Death Perception... to something like you."

The short knife slid into her chest.

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