"What do we do? What are we supposed to do?"
Matsudaira, a branch member of the Tokugawa line, had already lost all composure. He looked blankly toward Tokugawa, hunting for an answer that did not exist.
Tokugawa said nothing. The ashen cast of his face betrayed a certain helplessness.
What were they supposed to do? He would have liked to ask that question himself.
An undying witch who bewitched every man alive had suddenly acquired the power to fight an entire army by herself, and her personality had changed beyond recognition on top of it. How was anyone supposed to handle that?
"So she's a monster. So she can't die. As long as she's made of matter, she has a limit! She was wounded, wasn't she?! That proves modern weaponry still works on her! I propose we apply at once for special disposal authority, mobilize heavy firepower, and carry out a precision elimination with missiles! Vaporize that monster completely!"
Sasagawa Ryo slammed his palm on the table and shot to his feet, face flushed dark red, driving his fist down against the wood as he barked the words out.
The most radical of the right-wing godfathers, he could not stomach the thought of the Empire bowing its head to a single woman.
"Sasagawa! Have you lost your mind?!" another old man snapped back.
"Missiles, inside the Tokyo metropolitan area, to kill one person? Do you have any idea how many casualties that would cause? How much panic, how many international incidents?!"
"The hard part with Kawakami Tomie has never been killing her. It is what comes after she is killed. A single drop of blood, one scrap of flesh, perhaps nothing more than a spatter of tissue fluid - given the right conditions, any of it can grow into a new individual," Tokugawa said coldly, lifting his yellowed eyes and sweeping them across Sasagawa's scarlet face.
"You want to bomb her inside a city. Can you guarantee total sterilization? One fragment overlooked, washed into the sewers, settling into the soil of some park, or carried by the wind into a flowerpot on a resident's balcony - and we will be facing more mutated Tomies than we can count."
"Since you have spoken up, then give us your answer. How exactly are we to deal with this mutated Kawakami Tomie?"
Once Tokugawa had finished, Sasagawa Ryo cooled down with startling speed. He sat back into his chair and fixed his gaze on the old man.
Tokugawa had no reply, and the sensation of having walked into a trap settled over him. Still, as head of the Tokugawa family, he was expected to produce a decision.
"…Against an individual like Kawakami Tomie, the ability to transmute matter remains the more effective approach."
After a moment's deliberation, Tokugawa's gaze came to rest on Ampere's face.
"Do you wish me to seek aid from Lady Madonna?"
Ampere, silent until now, read the meaning carried in Tokugawa's look and finally spoke.
"That Lady Madonna wields the divine power of the Lord's Judgment upon Sodom. If we can move her to act, then even with her immortal body, Kawakami Tomie could meet her destruction only in the shape of a pillar of salt."
As Tokugawa spoke, every gaze in the room turned toward Ampere.
These old men who had survived this long all possessed connections and powers of a supernatural sort, to one degree or another. But to turn them against a creature like Kawakami Tomie - setting aside whether it would even succeed, would success not simply mean drawing the fire onto oneself?
"…Perhaps it would be wiser to first sound out what Kawakami Tomie wants. There is nothing that cannot be discussed."
Ampere's brow creased so faintly it was nearly invisible, and he declined in the gentlest terms he could manage.
"Discussed? What do you imagine you can discuss with a witch who bewitches all living things? If she truly lacked something, would she need to negotiate for it?"
Sasagawa Ryo met the proposal with open contempt.
With an allure no man alive could resist, was there anything Kawakami Tomie could want that would give her the slightest difficulty?
Ampere had no rebuttal, and the conference room lapsed into a short silence.
Tokugawa's gaze settled on his face with a weight that permitted no argument, and not Tokugawa's alone. Stare after stare, some open and some veiled, all of them turned Ampere's way.
The air thickened, dense with a wordless coercion.
Bearing that silent pressure, Ampere's eyelid twitched. After a brief pause, he accepted the burning coal being handed to him.
"…Understood. I will contact Lady Madonna."
"Very good, Ampere-kun. The safety of the Empire now rests in your hands alone."
Tokugawa inclined his head slightly toward Ampere, the creases in his face seeming to ease, a look of relieved approval softening his mouth.
The heavy mood in the room slackened along with him. Someone let out a slow breath, someone else leaned back into his chair, another lifted a cup of tea that had long since gone cold - the unhurried poise of men accustomed to sitting above others, restored piece by piece.
It was then that Nakatomi, seated in the corner, spoke.
"Come to think of it… we may count ourselves fortunate in one respect. Kawakami Tomie wiped out the entire special forces unit, yet for reasons unknown she did not kill the Soul Reviver. Had she done so, we would not be sitting here debating how to deal with her at all."
The others went still, and then a dozen different expressions surfaced.
Confusion and unease in some, the giddy relief of men spared the executioner in others - and across a few faces, something distinctly odd flickered past.
The Soul Reviver's power was the most universally applicable means of prolonging life, yes. But the moment a Soul Reviver died, the life force poured into a body drained away with him, and that dependence on another man's survival was a side effect no one had ever learned to accept.
Which was precisely why the powerful all sought other roads to longevity. Only a handful ever succeeded, and most methods came bundled with consequences they could not bring themselves to bear.
"But… why didn't she kill the Soul Reviver? Simple mercy? Is Kawakami Tomie capable of such a thing? Or a hostage - no, Kawakami Tomie has no need of hostages. Or did she mean to seize the Soul Reviver's power of eternal life for herself? That doesn't work either. Kawakami Tomie already cannot die."
Senge, plainly rattled, floated one theory after another, and demolished each of them himself as he went.
"According to conditions at the scene, Kawakami Tomie did not pursue total annihilation. She appeared to be… conducting some kind of challenge. She permitted flight, so long as it occurred before she began the slaughter," the secretary said, turning a page of the report and stating it evenly.
"A challenge?"
Sasagawa Ryo's fury curdled into laughter. "A challenge to whom? Challenging what? Challenging herself? Proving her own strength?"
No one could answer him.
It was nothing at all like something Kawakami Tomie would do.
And yet, judging by the bizarre attitude this mutated Kawakami Tomie had displayed, matters seemed to stand exactly as Sasagawa Ryo described. She sought no wealth and no authority - and had she wanted either, she would never have needed force to obtain it.
From the night Takaichi was murdered to this one, there had been no shortage of men attempting to negotiate with her, and not one had gotten anywhere. Kawakami Tomie truly seemed to be provoking the government for no reason beyond testing the limits of her own power.
"It's absurd. But it's so absurd that it starts sounding true."
Aso's mouth twisted into the look of a man who wanted to laugh at how far past words the situation had gone, and who suspected laughing would only make it worse.
"In this world, monsters whose minds don't work like ours - haven't we always had them by the cartload?"
"…"
There was nothing to say, and no strength left to argue.
Hearing Aso's remark, more than one man wanted to object, and found the words dying before they reached his lips.
There were too many. Far too many lunatics, and far too many uncanny curses that carried mental contamination as standard equipment. Even men perched as high as they were had watched friends and old colleagues twist in the mind for reasons no one could explain, until at last the flesh twisted after it and left a monster behind.
"Hell…" someone murmured.
Masters of this nation though they were, they could not deny it: the world was hell, and their own games, played without a floor of morality beneath them, were nothing more than laughing to keep from weeping - though of course, only men like them would call such atrocities laughter.
Just then a rapid knocking struck the conference room door, and a young man in a black suit pushed it open without waiting for permission, delight breaking across his face.
"Forgive the intrusion!" He bowed quickly, his voice unsteady. "Urgent report! Word has just come back from the Takaichi residence! Every guest inside the estate, including Lord Takaichi - they are all alive! No fatalities!"
"What?!"
"Alive? All of them?"
"Not a single one killed?!"
Exclamations broke out one after another. Tokugawa sat bolt upright, a sharp light cutting through his yellowed eyes.
"Explain properly!"
"Yes! Medical and reconnaissance teams entered the Takaichi residence after the perpetrator departed. It has been confirmed that every guest caught up in the incident has stable vital signs and only minor injuries. They remain in the main hall for now. They appear merely to have been badly frightened, but their minds seem entirely clear."
The room sat stunned, exchanging looks that carried no words.
Better than two hundred dead all told, from first to last - and now she had spared the guests who came to the Takaichi residence to witness the ceremony?
Was there any logic in that?
"…Don't tell me it really is some test of herself. Kill only the units with combat capability, spare the ones without?"
The expression on Takatsukasa's face defied description.
A thing with no logic in it whatsoever - and yet, applied to Kawakami Tomie, it somehow felt reasonable.
"For now that is the only way to read it."
A sigh escaped Tokugawa. Then his bearing hardened.
"Tonight's events must be sealed completely. The unified public line: a catastrophic pipeline explosion occurred on [XXX] Street. A gas leak triggered a chain of explosions, fires, and mass hallucinations, which unfortunately involved a police helicopter conducting exercises nearby, resulting in heavy casualties among officers. The Superintendent-General and others perished heroically in the line of duty, having gone to the scene to direct operations personally. Investigation and cleanup begin at once. Media control rises to the highest level."
"Second: Kawakami Tomie's whereabouts. Employ every means short of direct confrontation to search covertly. We must locate that mutated individual, but no rash action is permitted. The elimination assignment falls to Ampere-san."
"Last: request that the survivors and Takaichi remain at the Takaichi residence for the time being and undergo treatment from psychiatric physicians."
Tokugawa laid out the arrangements crisply.
The others nodded in silence, their faces grave, or grim, or sour.
Cleanup. Pursuit. And the matter that mattered most - confirming the mental stability of Takaichi and everyone who had come to witness the ceremony.
That was it.
The third item was the important one.
In truth, for the powerful men gathered in that room, the ideal outcome would have been every person at the Takaichi residence dead.
With all of them gone there would be tremors, certainly, but the vacancies could be filled with their own people soon enough.
Alive, however - who could guarantee those people had not been mentally contaminated by Kawakami Tomie? And most of them occupied the fourth tier of the pyramid of power, some as high as the second. They could not be casually cut out of the game.
The situation now facing them was precisely that worst outcome.
Tokugawa's orders were carried out without delay.
Cleanup and blackout, pursuit and preparation - none of it could be accomplished in an hour. The first task executed was the assessment and surveillance of Takaichi and the others.
A team of psychiatric physicians and specialists, designated from within, arrived at the Takaichi residence under cover of night and entered the estate shortly after dawn.
The examinations were exhaustive. The findings that came back were normal to the point of disbelief.
Physiological indicators were near baseline, with only mild tachycardia and elevated stress hormone levels. On the psychological side, through interviews, questionnaires, and brainwave monitoring, the doctors hunted for any trace of mental control.
They found nothing.
Mara Tomie's demonic Hypnosis was not surface suggestion at all, but a remaking that reached down into personality and the subconscious. Forget these doctors - even Murata, the man who had taught Amamiya Rin Hypnosis, would have struggled to detect a trace of it had he stood in that room.
As far as the psychiatrists and specialists could tell, these great men had simply been frightened out of their wits.
Not one test so much as brushed their subconscious minds.
The conclusion finally submitted read: collective acute stress reaction, accompanied by mild adjustment disorder. No definitive evidence of externally imposed mental control identified.
Reactions among the leadership who received the report varied.
Some breathed easier, deciding this really might be luck, that Kawakami Tomie had merely been indulging a whim. Others grew more anxious still: a monster with terrifying power whose actions could not be predicted was far harder to handle than a monster that only knew how to kill.
Either way, the investigation and surveillance of Takaichi and his fellows could go no further.
Those people were hardly ordinary citizens. They were senior figures spanning politics, business, the military, and religion, and though their influence fell short of the men at the top, taken together it was not to be underestimated. Without hard proof, any attempt to squeeze them would only invite retaliation nobody needed.
And so, while the gods who ruled this country labored over Swordmaster Tomie's actions and walked a road of no return thanks to Mara Tomie's conjuring, elsewhere Amamiya Rin and Flesh-Mod Tomie were leaving Nerima Ward behind.
Under the night sky the jeep rolled steadily along the city streets. Amamiya Rin sat in the passenger seat with his eyes half open, half closed, resting his mind while he listened to the stirrings carried in from every direction through the Tomie Network.
Everything Swordmaster Tomie and Mara Tomie had done over the past half hour laid itself out inside his head.
The one behind the wheel was Flesh-Mod Tomie.
There was no helping it. He was mentally spent.
Transforming into Ultraseven, and above all firing the beam technique, placed an enormous burden on his soul. That overdrawn feeling reached down to the level of the soul itself, like days on end of high-intensity thought without sleep. It would leave no permanent damage, but recovery demanded proper rest.
So the driving fell to Flesh-Mod Tomie.
As for where the jeep was headed - Tokyo Prison.
____
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