"Hoo..."
Eto slowly exhaled. With that, the sound of her breathing faded away.
Her heartbeat slowed, and even the sweat beading on her skin seemed to dissolve into the darkness.
Right now, Eto was here, and yet not here at all. Her presence had vanished to almost nothing.
"Not bad. Even if it's only imitation..."
Eto hadn't learned how to erase her presence on her own.
It was only an imitation of the man who had once called himself the "Owl" when they met. A man who seemed to be there and not there at the same time.
But the art of suppressing her presence, which had begun as imitation, was now well on its way.
It was enough to hide herself for a while from the monster-like man named Arima.
Having erased her presence like that, Eto cautiously poked her head out from a pipe near the ceiling.
"Grrrr..."
"Uhh... sob..."
There was one Ghoul grinding its teeth in fury, furious over something.
There was another Ghoul weeping bitterly, crying as if the world had ended.
They seemed to be companions, walking side by side beneath the pipe where Eto was hiding.
Crunch!!
Then, all of a sudden, the sobbing Ghoul whipped its head around and bit into the face of the furious one.
It happened in an instant.
The furious Ghoul tried to resist, but with its face and neck already torn apart and its innards spilling out, resistance could not last long.
"Kuhuhuh..."
Crunch! Crunch! Rrrip!!
Even while sobbing, the Ghoul did not stop eating the other one.
By the time it had devoured about half of the other Ghoul's upper body, it stood up and began walking again as if nothing had happened.
Even after the Ghoul disappeared into the darkness, the crying continued for a while before finally fading away.
"...They're insane."
This was already the third time she had witnessed something like this.
The worst of them had been the sight of Ghouls who seemed to have fought each other for the right to eat one another, tearing out each other's entrails and chewing them down. Those Ghouls, and the ones from just now, were all impossible to look at as sane beings.
What on earth was this place?
Ever since earlier, Ghouls devouring each other had kept appearing in her sight.
If the place they had just been in belonged to Ghoul Investigators, then this place felt like one ruled by deranged Ghouls.
The thought that Koma might be somewhere in a place like this made her restless with anxiety.
There was a powerful Ghoul Investigator beside her, yes, but only in the relative sense of being an ally. If she judged by danger, he was worse than the Ghouls here.
"Is the only thing I can do pray that he's safe...?"
Helplessness was a terrible thing.
With that thought in her chest, the same thought Koma, her father, would have had, Eto moved along the pipe.
The map was with Koma, but she remembered the route to the first blockade, where a Ghoul group from the 20th Ward should be waiting.
Avoiding pointless waste of stamina from running into deranged Ghouls, Eto advanced carefully.
By the time she had gone on and what felt like fifteen minutes had passed,
"...?"
Eto's five senses were gathering every bit of information around her.
Her sight pierced the darkness to inspect the shapes nearby, her hearing caught even the sound of rats moving through the walls, her touch read the vibrations around her, her sense of smell picked up the scent of living things, and her sense of taste detected changes in the air itself.
Gathering and combining all that information as it came, she sensed changes in her surroundings like a radar.
This was not imitation of the Owl. It was something Eto had awakened to out of necessity. Without realizing it, she was becoming more and more like a hunter.
Something strange caught that radar of hers.
It wasn't a Ghoul. There had been no Ghouls nearby since the sobbing one that had just passed.
What Eto sensed was something else.
"A Ghoul Investigator."
It wasn't Arima.
A completely different Investigator's presence.
By the number of footsteps and voices, there were three.
Two men. One woman.
Their position was one level below.
Tap.
Dropping from the pipe to the floor, Eto pressed her ear to the ground.
She knew this was not the time to be leisurely spying on Investigators. But there was a word she simply could not pass by that had caught at her ankles.
"The 'One-Eyed Ghoul that appeared a hundred years ago'?"
**
"The 24th Ward...? That kind of thing is just superstition."
"There's no proof it has to be superstition. Every rumor has a source."
"Hey, Mado. Doesn't it seem like your wife is still keeping the sensibilities of a dreamy little girl?"
Marude frowned and looked over at the tall, thin man walking beside him.
The man named Mado Kureo curved his slightly slanted eyes with amusement and said, "That's part of her charm, isn't it? I'd be happy if our daughter had even a little of that sensibility too... Lately, I've been worried she's growing up far too stoic."
"Oh? If you're talking about our Akira, there's nothing to worry about. She'll definitely grow into a fine woman, just like me."
As she spoke, Mado Kureo's wife, Mado Kasuka, swung the Quinque in her hand.
Sshhk!!
"Ghk...!!"
A Ghoul that had crept up silently from the shadow of a pipe and was about to launch a surprise attack had its neck severed the instant it sprang out.
A Quinque shaped like a rapier. Kasuka shook the blood from the thin blade and moved on as if nothing had happened.
"Back to what I was saying, I do think the 24th Ward really exists. Otherwise, it's hard to explain the Ghouls that keep popping out of the underground at regular intervals."
"So these Ghouls are Ghouls from the 24th Ward?"
Marude nudged the severed Ghoul's torso with the tip of his shoe. Before answering, Kasuka turned to Kureo and asked, "Honey, is this one a cannibal Ghoul too?"
At that, Kureo picked up the Ghoul's rolling head and said, "Judging by the way it was trying to ambush us, it can think and act intelligently... but yes, there are traces of cannibalism. It must have retained some reason because it hasn't been long since it ate another Ghoul."
"Cannibalism again. That makes seven this time. Isn't that enough?"
"Enough for what?"
When Kasuka turned and spoke to him, Marude frowned as if to say he had no idea what she was talking about.
"Where do you think the best environment for a Ghoul to commit cannibalism would be? Obviously a place with no humans and nothing but Ghouls lurking everywhere. Doesn't that fit the conditions of the 24th Ward perfectly? It's deep underground, so there's no way human hands could reach it. Ghouls who fled there while escaping the Investigators must have run out of food and started eating each other."
Kasuka's lively voice, walking ahead of Marude and Kureo, had by now dropped considerably.
"It's like the Chinese sorcery called gu-dok. Poison insects trapped in a jar with no way out, devouring one another until only the one with the strongest poison survives."
There was a trace of pity in her voice.
Even if they were Ghouls, enemies of humanity, even if they were beings the Investigators had no choice but to exterminate, their fate—forced into such a tragic end—was something she could not help feeling sympathy for.
Marude understood Kasuka's feelings, but that was not the mindset a Ghoul Investigator should have, so he deliberately replied in a dry tone.
"For something with the strongest poison, they looked pretty weak to me."
"Heh. That's not something you should say when you nearly got killed by that weak-looking Ghoul."
"Don't laugh! It's not like I wanted to be weak! You two are just teaming up to get on my nerves!"
As Marude flared up in irritation, Kasuka, still grinning with Kureo, said, "The jar must have had a hole in it somewhere before the strongest poison insect could be made. That's why only half-baked Ghouls came out."
"Kasuka and I once encountered a truly dangerous Ghoul among the cannibals. Ghouls like these, soaked to the bone in madness, are nothing but small fry. The truly dangerous ones are the ones who keep repeating cannibalism and still retain their reason."
"Maybe some part of the Kakuja wall blocking the way to the 24th Ward was damaged? Like my husband said, maybe the hole was made when a powerful Ghoul that could still keep its reason passed through, and the surviving scraps of Ghouls emerged through it."
"What? Then this is no time to be standing around! We came to check because there were suspicious Ghoul movements outside the extermination squad's perimeter, but if there's someone that dangerous, we need to request backup!"
Marude said that, but Kasuka shook her head.
"It's still only a theory. We can't pull people away from the extermination squad on theory alone. Not until we find something concrete. Well, no matter how strong a Ghoul appears, it should be fine. We've got enough room to run if things get dangerous. ...Unless it's the phantom of the One-Eyed Ghoul that appeared a hundred years ago."
"The One-Eyed Ghoul?"
Marude stared blankly, as if asking what that was.
He had been a Ghoul Investigator for quite some time, but this was the first he had ever heard of a Ghoul called that.
The answer came from Kureo beside him.
"I don't know the details either. There was a tremendous incident about a hundred years ago. An event so catastrophic that hardly any records remained, and both humans and Ghouls were slaughtered in droves. It was all done by a Ghoul with a Kakugan in only one eye."
"The CCG records say it was exterminated, but... I still find it suspicious. A huge Kakuja wall blocking the way whenever you try to go deeper underground. It doesn't look like something that could have formed naturally. I heard this from a Ghoul we captured before: there's a rumor that the One-Eyed Ghoul who fled from humans hid underground and created the 24th Ward."
Just as Marude's eyes were lighting up with this new information,
A moment later, his eyes narrowed as he asked Kasuka's back, "You talk about this kind of thing with Ghouls too?"
"I keep them locked up in Cochlea, but I visit them from time to time. You can get a lot of useful information from the world as seen from a Ghoul's point of view."
"How exactly is that useful..."
Swish.
Kasuka's arm rose quietly and cut off the rest of Marude's words.
It was the same instant Eto, intrigued by the conversation she had overheard, landed on the floor above.
Eto's mistake was that she had not expected there to be anyone among the Investigators capable of sensing her presence through a single floor.
Shhk!!
Kasuka sprang up a nearby pipe and thrust her rapier-shaped Quinque toward the ceiling.
"...?! "
And Eto, who had been pressing her ear to the floor to eavesdrop, jolted in alarm as a blade suddenly burst up through the floor and threw herself back.
The dark red blade grazed Eto's right cheek by a hair, leaving a cut.
"Oh? I aimed for the eye, but you dodged it?"
Feeling the resistance at the tip of her blade, Kasuka realized her strike had missed. The moment she understood that, she immediately flowed into her next attack.
Kwagagagagak!!!
The rapier blade kept bursting up from the floor in rapid succession, chasing Eto.
Dodging the barrage that poured up from below with quick backward steps, Eto finally decided she could not keep this up and hurled herself toward the ceiling.
Only then did the blade stop stabbing and stand still.
Without even seeing it, Kasuka knew from the sensation transmitted through the Quinque that Eto had escaped beyond its reach.
"What's wrong?"
Seeing his wife standing still after stopping her attack, Kureo realized something had not gone well.
Kasuka pulled the Quinque free from the ceiling, dropped back to the floor, and said, "There's a Ghoul above us. A pretty nimble one, too."
There was no trace of the pity she had shown the Ghoul just moments earlier on Kasuka's face now.
Only a hunter baring her killing intent to fulfill the duty of a Ghoul Investigator remained.
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