Kayako was genuinely afraid now.
The gap in power between them was undeniable. Even when Kawakami Tomie assumed her strongest form, she still couldn't shake Kayako's dominance — not even slightly.
But... cockroaches.
To Kayako, Kawakami Tomie was, without question, a cockroach. Difficult to kill outright, breeding at a terrifying rate, trivially easy to crush — and yet the gore and the eggs that burst from each crushed body could never be fully cleaned away. They got under your skin. They were repulsive, and they were inescapable.
That was exactly what Kawakami Tomie was, in Kayako's eyes. Something disgusting. Something that refused to go away.
The women outside made a ruckus for a good while longer, but Kayako gave them nothing — no response, no reaction, not even a flicker of acknowledgment.
Eventually, no one could muster the energy to keep pushing.
"So what do we do?"
"What do we do? Don't ask something so spineless."
"Amamiya..."
"He can sort himself out. It's not like we're going to volunteer to solve his problems for him."
"Thinking and commanding — that's his job. If he ends up dead at the hands of that ugly woman because he ran out of ideas, it just means his limits showed themselves."
"Heheh. That's ice cold."
...
The Tomies traded words with graceful smiles and languid ease, their voices carrying that characteristic contemptuous lilt.
And yet — beneath it all — their eyes gave them away. There was something in the way they glanced inward: a quiet, unspoken expectation directed at Amamiya Rin.
(Fine. I'll figure something else out.)
Amamiya Rin's calm, measured voice resonated through the Tomie Network, cutting through their performative deliberating.
(Stay where you are for now. Any of you still in Tokyo — get some clothes to the ones outside. You probably don't care, but standing around half-dressed on the street is going to draw the kind of attention we don't need.)
A few noncommittal hums and lazy murmurs of acknowledgment drifted through the Tomie Network in reply — reluctant acceptance of the arrangement.
He closed the connection.
Coming back to himself, Amamiya Rin redirected his attention to the immediate problem in front of him: Mamiya Yuka, still laughing without any sign of stopping.
He studied her shoulders, trembling continuously with each helpless burst of laughter. His brow creased.
The two comedians' obsession was becoming top-tier stars — prime-time royalty. That meant they had no motive to kill their audience. Mamiya Yuka wasn't in danger of literally laughing herself to death, the way the family in the manga had been.
But he couldn't let her keep going like this, either.
Something had to be done.
Amamiya Rin closed his eyes. He drew a long, slow breath, and guided his awareness downward — deeper, layer by layer, toward the quieter levels of his mind.
Count. Follow. Stop. Contemplate. Return. Purify.
The Six Gates of Wondrous Dharma cycled through his inner world, and stray thoughts scattered like motes of dust swept aside by a clean wind.
He entered a state of deep Dhyana with practiced speed. His senses turned inward, folding against themselves. His perception of the outside world blurred and receded — and in that receding, something else was quietly amplified: an instinct that could not be named, or perhaps simply the sixth sense.
Amamiya Rin slowly opened his eyes and looked at Mamiya Yuka. His gaze settled on the space just to her right.
He saw nothing.
But an instinct that defied any rational articulation told him — something was there.
It was like the way a person sometimes feels, for no reason at all, that someone is standing behind them. Or the sensation of being watched from a direction that turns out to be empty. Or the groundless certainty, arriving without cause, that something is about to happen.
That same feeling had taken hold of him now. Something was to Mamiya Yuka's right. Something that was making her laugh.
The instinct had no evidence. And yet it was perfectly, crystallinely clear.
Amamiya Rin's will locked onto that invisible presence. He pressed the fingers of his right hand flat together, edge-forward like a blade. His left hand braced against the wall. He rose — swaying slightly — and walked toward Mamiya Yuka.
"Something is there. I will hit it."
The fierce, unbroken self-suggestion narrowed his focus to a single point of pure intention.
There was no second-guessing. No hesitation. He simply decided — and moved.
His hand-blade swept through the air in a clean, decisive diagonal slash, the full weight of his will driving it down toward the empty space to Mamiya Yuka's right.
The air seemed to part around an invisible edge.
His hand-blade struck precisely into that void. No impact sound. No flash of light. No solid object to hit.
But in the instant the blade passed through — Amamiya Rin felt something. Unmistakably. A sensation that was extraordinarily clear.
It was like a sharp edge cutting through something invisible that was both tough and viscous — like jelly, or a current of water. A distinctly unpleasant resistance, sticky and clinging, that jolted through the nerves along his arm and vanished in the same instant it arrived.
"Hic—!"
Mamiya Yuka's laughter was severed as though someone had grabbed it by the throat. It cut off with jarring abruptness, leaving nothing behind but one loud, startled hiccup.
The smile on her face lingered for a moment — frozen — and then melted into blank, bewildered vacancy.
She touched her own cheek. She rubbed her own stomach. The gears weren't turning yet. She couldn't process how one casual wave of Amamiya Rin's hand had made that irrepressible, helpless urge to burst out laughing simply... disappear.
Amamiya Rin slowly drew his hand back and resettled himself onto the tatami.
The tips of his fingers still carried a ghost of that strange, fleeting sensation. But the feeling in his chest — that absolute certainty that something was there — was gone. Completely. Without a trace.
"This is what mind over matter means..."
Amamiya Rin murmured to himself.
Belief itself is a form of power.
He had learned the theory of mind over matter from the Abbot. He had watched Kawakami Tomie put that philosophy into practice with his own eyes — bending her own cellular division to the force of her will.
But attempting it himself — manifesting the concept through his own strength, in his own hands — that was a first.
"How did you do that?! That was incredible!"
Mamiya Yuka launched herself across the room and knelt at the edge of the tatami, eyes fixed unblinking on Amamiya Rin's arm. Her dark, pearl-like eyes were practically sparkling.
Not a trace of fear about what had just happened to her. Only excitement — the pure, guileless thrill of watching Amamiya Rin solve the problem with a single hand-blade.
This girl had... an extraordinary capacity for fearlessness.
"Basic exorcism technique. Not much different from scattering salt."
Amamiya Rin leaned back against the wall, letting it take his full weight, reducing the burden on his exhausted body.
"Salt? I tried that!"
Mamiya Yuka twisted around and flopped down onto her stomach, sweeping her hands across the floor — and only then did Amamiya Rin notice: there were quite a few white salt granules scattered across the tatami.
She gathered them into a small pile, pinched up a little heap, and held it out toward him.
"Because your heart wasn't sincere enough..."
The moment the words were out, Amamiya Rin caught himself. That sounded exactly like something a street charlatan would say. He corrected course immediately.
"I know that sounds like a con, but — if your will isn't firm, the salt won't work. It genuinely can't exorcise anything."
"Will not being firm... Higa-san said something similar. But what does it actually mean for your will to be firm?"
Mamiya Yuka tilted her head, brow furrowed with genuine puzzlement.
"Higa..."
The name caught Amamiya Rin's attention. It was familiar.
In a horror film he'd seen in his previous life, the female protagonist and Japan's foremost exorcist had shared the surname Higa. The film had a novelization and a manga adaptation too — he'd tracked both down and read them.
"She's a psychic that a senior colleague at the publisher knows! A really cool, beautiful woman."
Mamiya Yuka explained with eager enthusiasm.
"That might be someone I know of. But — it doesn't matter."
Amamiya Rin gave a faint nod. From Mamiya Yuka's description alone, he could tell: the Higa she was talking about and the Higa he knew of were one and the same.
He didn't make a big deal of it. This world was plainly a convergence of countless Japanese horror works, all blended together. Nothing surprising about it. Nothing worth dwelling on.
After all — the so-called Three Great Ghost Kings, put together, wouldn't even be enough for Hellstar Remina to swallow in a single bite.
____
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