"It would hardly be fair for me to suffer alone while the imposters reap all the benefits, would it?"
One of the Kawakami Tomies rested both arms on the desk, propping her chin on the backs of her hands, smiling with sweet satisfaction as she spoke.
The moment she opened her mouth, Amamiya Rin recognized her — she was the same Tomie he'd spoken with the day before.
"Hmph! Doing something pointlessly spiteful with no gain for ourselves — now that really is our style."
The Tomie seated beside her let out a cold snicker.
Kawakami Tomie showed not the slightest trace of shame. If anything, her smugness deepened.
She had gone to considerable effort to track down every last imposter and bring them together. Fifty-odd Tomies, scattered across Tokyo the moment they entered the Dream World — under normal circumstances, rounding them all up would have been nearly impossible. But a sufficiently powerful act of will could bend the Dream World itself. All Kawakami Tomie had to do was locate the ones who knew where the others were, then pool their consciousness — and under the pull of that shared awareness, they naturally drifted toward the rest.
More than half of those Tomies had, not long before, put themselves to sleep through self-suggestion, intending to snooze straight through until the dream ended. Kawakami Tomie had woken every single one of them.
Aamamiya Rin stepped into the classroom, his gaze sweeping the room — and then it stopped dead.
One figure stood out instantly amid the sea of identical faces. A small, slight girl. The demon's daughter.
He didn't know what name she'd gone by before. But now, she could probably be called Aizawa Tomie.
"We meet again — though I suppose this is technically our first proper meeting, isn't it?"
Aamamiya Rin took the seat beside Aizawa Tomie and extended his right hand toward her with a friendly smile.
"Heheh. Yeah, we meet again. How about you offer me your brain matter as a gift to celebrate?"
Aizawa Tomie fixed him with a hollow, unsettling stare, a strange smile crawling across her face.
"Hahaha. That's a pretty good joke."
Aamamiya Rin laughed it off without missing a beat, withdrawing his hand naturally, then tilted his head with genuine curiosity.
"You seem to be in good spirits. Feel like talking? Tell me — who do you think you are right now?"
"Are you an idiot? I'm obviously myself. The one and only real Kawakami Tomie!"
Aizawa Tomie stated this as though it were the most self-evident truth in the world.
"Ah. Right. That's correct."
Aamamiya Rin looked at her with quiet pity.
Her body hadn't fully converted yet — but it was obvious. Aizawa Tomie's consciousness had been completely subsumed by Kawakami Tomie's. Her nervous system, her very sense of self, was actively rebuilding itself around the identity of Kawakami Tomie.
The Sacred Khala could never have achieved this. All it could do was link minds through a shared neural connection. But Aizawa Tomie had been absorbed after the Sacred Khala became the Tomie Network — and that made all the difference.
She still retained the old appetite for brain matter. But her self-perception had been rewritten, completely and utterly, into Kawakami Tomie.
"Tomie — how much do you know about the demon?"
Before Aizawa Tomie could take offense at Amamiya Rin's expression, he pivoted the subject.
"I'm the child my mother had with a demon. That demon is some idiot who loves to apologize. My worthless brother dug up some ritual from who knows where, summoned the thing, made a wish, and got a power out of it."
Aizawa Tomie shrugged, speaking with casual indifference as her fingernail began dragging across the surface of the desk — producing a sharp, grating screech.
"Summoning a demon, making a wish, receiving a power... and the price?"
Aamamiya Rin reached out and pressed his hand over her small fidgeting one, silencing the awful sound.
"How would I know something like that? I don't even know where the edge of the universe is."
Aizawa Tomie pulled her hand out from under his with an impatient roll of her eyes.
"What about the ritual itself? Surely you know what that involved?"
Aamamiya Rin pressed on.
"I know it, yeah — but why are you asking? Are you thinking of making a contract with my biological father yourself?"
Aizawa Tomie's eyes turned dangerous. She bared her teeth, her demeanor shifting into something openly hostile.
"Is that it? You want to get your hands on that disfigurement curse to use against me?!"
Before she'd even finished speaking, fifty-odd pairs of eyes swiveled in unison onto Amamiya Rin.
"Why are you all looking at me?"
He turned his head. From every direction, more than fifty Tomies were staring at him with expressions that promised nothing good.
Their eyes said it plainly enough: if Amamiya Rin so much as admitted he'd considered it, they would carve him into mincemeat on the spot.
"Is that really the kind of person you think I am?"
"Your personal code definitely doesn't include restricting yourself to ethical methods when dealing with enemies."
One of the Tomies stated it bluntly.
"Do you really think you rank higher on my list of priorities than a world-ending demon who kills for the sheer joy of it? Aren't you all a little too high on yourselves?"
Facing the wall of suspicious stares without so much as flinching, Amamiya Rin shot the question right back at them.
The Tomies collectively faltered. Then, one by one, they turned away with affected nonchalance, pretending they hadn't said anything at all.
Aamamiya Rin turned back to Aizawa Tomie. His expression was serious now — earnest, even. He laid out his thinking plainly.
"The Apology Demon must operate according to some kind of rule or law. Otherwise, a ritual for summoning it and granting wishes wouldn't exist. Even if we can't exploit that ruleset directly — if we ever want to kill it, we need to know how to summon it and pull it into the same dimensional plane as us.
Naturally, that method is useless right now. Even if we summoned the Apology Demon today, we couldn't beat it. But we need to record the method in advance — before the span of a Long Dream causes you to forget the ritual entirely."
Once she had Amamiya Rin's answer, Aizawa Tomie didn't waste words. She didn't spare a single thought for the fact that the target of this plan was her own father. She pulled out a notebook immediately and wrote down the specifics of the summoning ritual.
The process was straightforward: kill a small animal; at a specific time and place, suspend the carcass and arrange it in a precise sequence; light candles; recite a particular incantation. The Apology Demon would appear.
Aamamiya Rin read through it once, then copied every detail into his own notebook. He planned to review it every single day — because the moment he left the Dream World, there was every chance he'd forget.
Time flew. Years passed in the blink of an eye.
Through that long stretch, Amamiya Rin continued his studies — while the Tomies kept each other in check, and none of them slackened.
They studied medicine. They trained in Hypnosis.
Slowly, gradually, the Tomies turned what had once been a passive reflex — their bodies fragmenting whenever their mental state destabilized — into something they could consciously control.
At first, they could only split a second head from their own. Not particularly useful in a fight... or so it seemed — but in the Dream World, where the Tomie Network didn't exist, having an extra head that was willing to cooperate wasn't entirely without merit.
In the real world, though, with fifty-odd consciousnesses already working in concert, one extra head wasn't going to tip any scales.
But after long and grueling training, the point of division was no longer limited to starting from the head.
On the school's practice field, Kawakami Tomie drew a long, slow breath. She visualized the muscle fibers near her shoulder blade — their separation, their proliferation, their reconstruction, all driven by the force of her will alone...
Within seconds, her right shoulder began to swell. The muscle rippled and writhed beneath her skin — and then a pale, slender arm tore through her clothing from below the shoulder blade and extended outward.
The newborn arm spread its five fingers wide, then clenched them into a fist. The wrist rotated. It even traced a few simple gestures in the air, confirming with absolute certainty: fully under control.
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