A young waiter approached promptly, professional smile in place — but the moment his eyes landed on Amamiya Rin's face, he visibly faltered, the tips of his ears going red.
"H-Hello, what can I get for you?"
"A glass of ice water, please."
Amamiya Rin modulated his vocal cords, letting his voice come out with its faint, cool edge — pleasant to the ear, and nothing more.
The waiter looked mildly crestfallen, but dutifully went off and returned shortly with a glass of ice water.
Amamiya Rin picked up the glass. The chill of it seeped into his fingertips.
He sipped slowly, his gaze resting mostly on the street outside the window, drifting occasionally to the café entrance and the wall clock.
Time ticked by, second by second.
Three o'clock.
Three-ten.
Three-twenty.
The woman had yet to appear. Amamiya Rin was not particularly bothered — women being late was the most natural thing in the world.
What he didn't know was that while the woman had failed to turn up at the café, the Kawakami Tomie who had set out for the distillery was already nearly at her destination.
Kawakami Tomie stepped off the bus at the roadside and looked up.
In the distance, ridges of mountains layered one behind the other, their silhouettes crisp and clean in the afternoon sun. Scattered at their base were low, modest houses, and a concrete road stretched from the highway's edge deep into the village, flanked on both sides by orderly fields where a few villagers were working the land.
Tomie walked the concrete road into the village, her high heels clicking sharply against the cracked surface with each step.
Before long, she arrived at her destination: a sake brewery that had clearly been renovated and expanded in recent times. The original structure was traditional wood-frame construction, but right beside it, a brand-new concrete factory building had risen from the ground — far larger than the old one.
Old and new stood together within a spacious compound. A simple security booth had been set up at the entrance. Two box trucks sat parked in the yard, and several workers in matching uniforms were busy loading sealed wooden crates onto them.
The guard in the booth was a man of around fifty. Seeing a visitor at the gate, he stepped out promptly, voice rough and blunt.
"Hey, miss. This is a restricted work area — no unauthorized personnel."
Tomie stopped. She tilted her chin up slightly, her gaze sweeping lazily across him.
"I'm here to see whoever's in charge."
"Do you have an appointment?"
The guard planted himself in her path and asked, dutifully doing his job.
"An appointment? I don't need anything like that. I'm going in. Move."
Tomie stated the unreasonable as though it were perfectly obvious — as though this brewery were her own territory — and the guard's face went momentarily slack with disbelief.
Without another word, she lifted her foot and walked forward.
The guard moved to stop her. Tomie swayed to one side, slipping past him with a dancer's ease, and in the same motion her right hand snapped out like a whip, driving the blade of her palm into the side of his neck. He didn't even manage a grunt before he crumpled to the ground.
Tomie despised being argued with. She despised even more the current state of affairs — where even an unremarkable, homely man like this felt entitled to give her trouble.
So she had no objection whatsoever to being rough about it.
The loading workers in the yard stopped what they were doing, staring over in bewilderment.
Tomie ignored their stares. Her gaze swept over the old and new buildings in turn, paused briefly, then turned toward the new factory — the one that looked more important.
"Hey! What do you think you're doing?"
Two of the workers set down their crates and strode toward her, shouting.
"Oh my. Instead of running, you're actually walking toward me?"
Tomie didn't slow down by a single step. She moved with that languid, swaying gait of hers, and a cold, vicious smile curled at the corner of her mouth.
The workers couldn't fathom what had gotten into her — until they had closed to within a meter. Just as they reached out to grab her, Tomie's arms swelled like rising dough, inflating a full size larger, and their length stretched out by several dozen centimeters in a way that defied all reason.
Two enormous hands seized the workers by the heads and smashed them together. The impact produced a dull, meaty thud.
Tomie let go. Both workers rolled their eyes back and collapsed.
The remaining four workers flinched back, recoiling in unison, their faces a picture of stunned, uncomprehending alarm.
Tomie drew a deep breath. Her legs unleashed a savage burst of raw power. Before the workers could even react, she was simply there, standing in front of them — having crossed the distance in an eyeblink, trailing a small cloud of dust.
Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud.
Four dull impacts, nearly simultaneous. All four workers folded like overcooked noodles and went down.
Tomie stood over the fallen men, an odd smile playing across her face.
She raised her right hand. The nail of her index finger lengthened and sharpened at an unnatural speed, its edge catching the light with a hard, keratinous gleam.
Tomie tilted her head, as if considering where to begin.
Then, without the slightest hesitation, she pressed that razor-sharp nail against her own right temple and began to bore.
The needle-point nail drilled through skin and flesh with ease, sinking in deep. Tomie's expression didn't flicker. Her fingertip probed around inside for a moment, scraping and scooping, and then she withdrew it.
Wedged in the groove of her nail was a small smear of dark red tissue. Tomie crouched down, used that same sharp nail to pierce the forehead of the nearest unconscious worker, drilling open a small hole, and pressed the flesh she had taken from her own temple into it.
Then she smoothed it over with a stroke of her thumb.
Done. She stood, and went about doing the same to each of the other unconscious workers, one by one.
Before long, the first worker to receive an implanted flesh-bud began to twitch faintly.
The eyeballs beneath his closed lids moved rapidly back and forth. A low, formless sound rattled in his throat.
Seconds later, his eyes snapped open — vacant and unfocused, no awareness behind them.
Moving with a slight stiffness, he pressed his hands to the ground and pushed himself upright.
(Hey, how is it? Can you control that body?)
Kawakami Tomie regarded the man before her with a look of lively curiosity and asked.
(What a peculiar way to play. But — why should I cooperate with you?)
A consciousness transmitted itself from within the man — it was the Tomie awareness contained within the flesh-bud, the piece of Kawakami Tomie's own tissue that had been implanted in his forehead.
These fragments of flesh, carrying Tomie's cranial nerve cells, lacked the power to assimilate males — but they possessed the ability to seize control of a male body, much like a parasitic organism.
When the consciousness dormant within those flesh-cell fragments awoke, the cranial nerves embedded in them would naturally connect to the [Tomie Network], and they would swiftly come to understand what had happened.
(I am not using a man's body!)
The other three workers rose to their feet one by one as well, each broadcasting waves of resentment toward the Kawakami Tomie standing before them.
What they wanted — what they truly wanted — was to immediately drain every last drop of life force from the males they were parasitizing, reconstitute themselves, and restore Kawakami Tomie's proper form. Not to demean themselves by languishing inside the bodies of a handful of ordinary men.
____
👻🔥Whant more?: Walnut-chan🔥👻
🔥 New history: Samsara Game: Starting with Shirogane Kei
Let's reach these milestones together:
🎯 100 Powerstones = +1 free chapter for all readers