Chapter 53 - Daisuke KuroganeHollow NightI’ll admit, I was starting to get impatient. I had his partner dead to rights, demonstrated that these two didn’t stand a rat’s chance in hell of beating me if I got serious – and yet, there he was, turning up his nose at me. Like he always fucking has.

  “I warned you,” I spat, and I felt the redhead struggling more than ever against my forearm now that I’d seemingly run out of lenience. “Say goodbye, dickhead.”

  I pulled my forearm down on the redhead’s neck hard, hard enough that I could feel the throbbing of her neck against my wrist. My eyes never left Rusuban as I slowly brought the kama’s razor-sharp edges mere millimetres from the underside of his partner’s chin.

  Okay.

  All I had to do was sink it in and let it rip. Easy as slicing a cake.

  So simple. I just had to push a little harder, let the bde carve its way into her throat. I could already imagine the warm spray of blood, the gurgled scream she'd make—Rusuban would break. He’d have to. He'd finally see me, not as some reject, but as the goddamn nightmare I am. The monster he’s been too stuck up his own ass to acknowledge.

  And yet, my arm… it wouldn’t move.

  I gritted my teeth, trying to force my hand, my entire body, to obey. I could feel the cold steel of the kama pressing against Kozuki’s skin, my fingers tensed to drive it deeper—but it was like some invisible force held me back, chaining me to the moment, keeping me from crossing that final line.

  What the hell was this?

  I tried again, applying pressure. Nothing. My arm trembled slightly, and the frustration bubbled up, hot and bitter in my throat. My mind screamed to finish it, to end her, to show them what despair really looked like. This should’ve been easy, just another casualty in a world that had never given a damn about me. Why couldn’t I—

  Do it!

  But the bde stayed hovering, so close to tearing through her flesh, yet something—something I couldn’t expin—kept me from following through.

  I felt a knot tighten in my chest, like a chokehold squeezing the life out of me instead of her. My grip sckened just a fraction. Her breath, ragged and strained, grazed my skin, and I hated how aware I was of it. Hated the way my own breath felt heavier, like I was suffocating instead of her.

  Why the hell was this happening? I wanted to see the fear in Rusuban’s eyes, wanted to hear him beg. I wanted to hear the life drain out of her.

  But I couldn’t.

  I clenched my jaw so tight I thought I’d break my teeth. I wanted to scream. This was supposed to be easy!

  "Say goodbye," I growled again, but even I could hear the falter in my voice. My own words, meant to sound menacing, hung limp in the air. There was no conviction in them.

  I was trembling now, the kama’s bde still poised but unmoving. It was infuriating, maddening. This was my moment to make him suffer, to make her pay for just existing, for everything that’s wrong. So why… why couldn’t I do it?

  The voice inside me, the one that always screamed at me to make them hurt, was suddenly... quiet. And in its pce, all I could feel was the weight of the bde, the tension in my arm, and the shallow, desperate gasps from Miharu beneath me.

  I swallowed hard, my throat dry. My fingers were losing their grip, and not just on the bde.

  “…please.”

  In the middle of my damn near breakdown, the words erupted like a squeak. I looked down to meet her pleading eyes, wet streamlets trailing down her cheeks. Had they always been that round?

  “He’s holding me against my will,” She whimpered after I’d foolishly loosened my grip without even noticing. “I have no choice but to obey him, or he’ll…he’ll kill me.”

  Shit. This is what I got for hesitating. But I wasn’t going to buy into it that easily.

  Firstly, she seemed pretty eager to have a go at me a few moments ago, when she wasn’t on the brink of death. Even if she couldn’t risk giving away too much in front of her ‘captor’, you can tell a lot about a person by the way they fight – and she was giving me everything she had, I’ll tell you that much.

  Not to mention I'm pretty sure the two of them were 'Partners' in respect to game. If Kozuki bit it, so would Rusuban - unless he had some way of circumventing that fact.

  Anyway, like we’ve already established, Rusuban was weak as shit. I wasn’t even sure what his powers were. I hadn’t stuck around long enough to see.

  But this is Rusuban of all people – whatever it was, it had to be the most pansy power of all time. Definitely something to do with getting others, like the pretty redhead here, to do all his dirty work for him. He doesn’t know any other way of living.

  I levelled my gaze back at the coward in question, only to find he wasn’t even watching. Rather, I noticed his eyes calmly darting back and forth across the underpass, like he was expecting something.

  …Or someone.

  My heart then practically took a nosedive when, In the bottom corner of my eye there was a brief fsh of red, followed by a steady blue. I gnced back down to the illumination’s origin, Kozuki, and almost missed the eerie shift in her expression.

  “Farewell,” she offered finally with a grin so satisfied that I had to blink twice. A sudden hiss filled the air, sharp and violent like a boiling kettle about to explode. Before I had time to process it, a rush of some kind of searing mist surged out from underneath us.

  "Shit!" I jerked back, releasing Kozuki as my arms instinctively shielded my eyes. The heat was unbearable, like it was trying to peel the skin right off my fucking bones.

  I staggered backward, disoriented, the world around me turning into a blinding, white haze. I could barely make out the redhead slipping from my grasp, a silhouette lost in the cloud of burning vapor.

  The hiss grew louder, surrounding me, trapping me in this thick, suffocating fog. Sweat rolled down my face in heavy beads, mixing with the stinging sensation on my skin. My vision was blurring, the edges all softening into some kind of shapeless haze. I could just about hear my own bored breaths, shallow and panicked, as I stumbled like a drunk old man through the smoke.

  My hand found my kama and started sshing at the air, trying to clear it, trying to find some sign of where the other two had gone. But it was like the steam was everywhere at once, pressing in from all sides, and with every step I took I was sinking deeper into a trap I hadn’t even seen coming.

  “Come on!” I snarled, my voice barely cutting through the dense cloud. "Is this how you fight?! Hiding in smoke?!"

  But there was no response. Just the relentless hissing of the steam and my own heart pounding in my ears.

  I spun around, eyes darting in every direction, but I couldn’t see a damn thing. I could feel my frustration bubbling up again, choking me, just like the heat. I wanted to sh out at something, anything, but there was nothing but this suffocating, smouldering mist.

  And then, just as quickly as it had appeared, the steam began to thin.

  The air cleared, slowly, revealing the world in these fragmented, shifting glimpses. My feet stopped moving as the shapes around me started to take form—tall, dark, hunched figures, one after another, creeping out from the smoke.

  My stomach twisted as I realized what I was looking at.

  Noise.

  A hell of a lot of them.

  I backed up instinctively, my heart racing. The twisted forms of the Noise seemed to come from everywhere, their ugly-ass bodies flickering in and out of the lingering fog. I tightened my grip on my kama, trying to calcute just how many of them were surrounding me. Too many. Way too many.

  My pulse quickened, but I wasn’t about to show any fear. Not now. Not in front of them.

  Through the dissipating steam, I caught sight of Kozuki and Rusuban, standing just beyond the gang of creatures, their faces shadowed, watching me. The redhead’s face had changed from the scared shitless hostage I held just moments ago. She looked almost... collected. Calm, even. The glint of some kind of silver steam pack glinted on her back, but it was her eyes that unsettled me—cold, calcuting.

  I spat onto the ground, ignoring the searing pain still buzzing across my skin. "You think this changes anything?" I growled, gring at the two of them, though I could feel the weight of the Noise closing in around me.

  Neither of them said a word. They didn’t have to. The small army that now surrounded me said it all.

  They’d pnned this.

  I flicked the kama in my hand, keeping my gaze locked on them, but the weight of the situation was settling heavy in my gut. I was surrounded. They had me dead to rights now.

  And judging by the ominous silence from Miharu and Rusuban as they watched me from the edge of the arena, they knew it too.

  The moment I realized just how many of them there were, my mind screamed for me to run. But I was cornered. Trapped in this circle of nightmare figures with Miharu and Rusuban watching from beyond like damn puppeteers pulling the strings.

  The faint smile pying on Rusuban's lips was infuriating. I’d tear it off his smug face, but I had to get through this swarm first.

  The closest Noise lunged at me, cws sshing toward my throat. I sidestepped just in time, swinging my kama with all the force I could muster.

  The bde sank into its neck, thick bck ooze spraying out as it fell. But for every one I cut down, two more seemed to slither out of the darkness, gnashing their jaws, closing in.

  "Out of my fucking way!" I snarled, darting left and sshing downward, cutting a Noise in half at the torso. The swarm didn't relent. I swung wildly, taking them down in bursts, but they came faster and faster, overwhelming me.

  This wasn’t a fight—it was a desperate scramble. My eyes shot over to my audience, still standing calmly on the far side, almost taunting me with their ck of concern.

  I needed to get to them. I needed an opening.

  I spun on my heel, looking for an escape route, and that’s when the realization hit me: these things weren’t just blindly attacking. Their movements were...too focused, too coordinated.

  As I ducked under a pair of sshing cws, my eyes caught something. A flicker, subtle but unmistakable.

  Green.

  The Noise’s eyes—every single one of them—were glowing a soft, unnatural green.

  My heart clenched in my chest.

  Fucking Rusuban.

  I had to think fast. I might not be able to brute-force my way through all of them, but there was something else. Something new. I let a twisted grin creep across my face.

  These bastards wanted to py mind games?

  They had no idea who they were dealing with.

  I backed up, raising both hands. The air crackled, a cold sweat breaking out on my skin as I tapped into that darkness inside me. My power. I didn’t need eye contact anymore. That was the beauty of it. I could project fear anywhere, infect anything within my reach.

  A thick, oppressive wave radiated out from me, seeping into the air around us like a growing storm cloud. The swarm of Noise faltered, their glowing green eyes flickering for a split second before their movements became... sluggish. Hesitant.

  I could feel it. The fear setting in. Not just for one or two of them—all of them. Their minds were mine now.

  They saw what I wanted them to see: visions of their worst nightmares. A full-blown frenzy overtook them and they started turning on one another, shrieking and cwing at their own flesh, ripping into their fellow Noise like they’d been trapped in a maze of horrors.

  I didn’t stop. The illusions grew stronger, warping reality around us. The entire underpass shifted under my command. Shadows stretched and warped, and for a moment it felt like the very air was suffocating with terror. I could hear their distorted cries—cries of confusion, agony.

  And they were delicious.

  I sshed through another Noise, then another, creating a path through the chaos. My legs were screaming, but I was getting closer. Closer to the redhead. Closer to him.

  Rusuban’s face twisted slightly as I closed the distance. Finally, that cocky grin of his was starting to slip.

  "That's right, bastard. Your pets aren’t going to save you," I growled through gritted teeth, breaking through the st of the crowd. Only a few more meters. I could see Miharu’s eyes widen slightly in surprise. I was almost there. Almost—

  Thwack!

  Out of nowhere, something heavy smashed into my ribs. My breath caught in my throat as pain exploded through my side, sending me sprawling to the ground. I wheezed, barely able to process what had hit me. I forced myself to look up.

  Rusuban was lowering his arm, a strange, twisted smirk pulling at his lips.

  "You really think I’d let you reach us?" His voice was soft, mocking. "You always overestimate yourself, Daisuke."

  The green light in the Noise's eyes pulsed, and I realized in horror that they weren’t just his minions—they were an extension of him. He wasn’t watching the fight. He was the fight.

  Before I could react, several of the creatures I'd thought I’d bested rose back to their feet, their movements now more purposeful, more driven. Rusuban’s influence tightened, guiding them like marionettes. They descended on me, faster than I could get up.

  I fought back, sshing, kicking, anything to get free—but it wasn’t enough. Cws grabbed my arms, pinning me to the ground. My legs buckled as I struggled to breathe. The Noise piled on top of me, forcing me down, overwhelming me with sheer numbers.

  I barely had time to scream before the weight of them crushed me to the cold floor, and the world went dark.