“That’s true, I’m not. You can call me Mirai.”

  “How about you tell the camera your name?” Mirai teased, hoisting the device a little higher. “We’ll find out either way, so this is your chance to make a show of it. Give us a bow!”

  Rin spat on the floor.

  “Fuck you,” she hissed. Her saliva marbled atop the drying blood.

  “Ahh, I’ll censor that once I get home, I think…”

  Mirai strapped the camera back to her waist, locking the clasps in place. No matter how much she wanted to, Rin didn’t lunge for it. There was no point–the damage had already been done. She only watched in silence as Mirai stopped in her tracks, beginning to slowly tilt the barrel of her gun upwards.

  “You think you’re fast enough to shoot me with that before I break your neck?” asked Rin in a deadpan tone.

  “Oh, there’s only one bullet in this thing, anyway. It’s just for show. I did do my research, you know! While I was secretly watching you, I saw just how easily you managed to avoid getting shot by my…. um… cannon fodder? Is that what you’d call them? So I decided on a different approach...”

  As she spoke Mirai aimed it fully at the ceiling, her other hand creeping into the inside of her jacket. What she drew out of it moments later looked like a small handheld taser, the sort of thing a woman her age would be seen carrying while going home on the metro; but this strange device was missing the insulated probe-like darts that were usually installed on the end. What sat there instead was a single large needle, tip gleaming threateningly under the lights.

  “I figured I’d just use this Limiter instead!”

  Rin felt a cold sweat stand out on her neck.

  In the brain of anybody with a neurokinetic ability, the copper they naturally ingested in their food was metabolized through small vein-like structures that wrapped all around the brain, and it was the core fuel for their feats of psychic power. But curiously enough, when the body happened to ingest silver, it mistook the metal for copper, and allowed it to build up and block those tiny channels from functioning.

  Medical professionals and the police often used Limiters to inject a mixture of silver dust and saline into berserk ability users, to temporarily prevent them from causing harm with their ability. But when used on a ketsujin, whose body function was directly reliant on their haemokinesis, it wreaked a painful havoc on their internal organs.

  The Limiter that Mirai held didn’t look like it had been medically approved. Rin had never seen needles in that size before.

  In a split second she was no longer holding back. Rin lunged, stretching out her hand to grab not the Limiter, but the shoulder of the woman who held it, intending to slam her back into the ground and shake it from her hand–

  –but at that exact moment Mirai disappeared.

  “What-?”

  Rin stumbled and for a moment she could’ve sworn her hands caught on something fabric, but then she righted herself and there was no sign of Mirai anywhere. She spun around, teeth bared, trying for just a moment to draw in a little air that held the woman’s identifying scent–but there was nothing. Only the faintest whisper.

  “You’re still here,” she hissed then, flexing her hands, sliding her two backup blades out from underneath her sleeves. They popped out from their holders with a click, cold against her palms. “You’re still somewhere in here, I know you are!”

  Mirai’s laughter echoed tinnily throughout the foyer.

  “Does it matter where I am or where I’m not? Either way, you can’t see me. Heh-eh….heh…”

  No, that was wrong.

  There was something of her still visible, if only barely. A sort of disturbance in the air, akin to ripples in a still pond. A silver shimmer, something warping, the briefest outline of a body.

  「 Photokinesis- 2nd Rank

  >> The ability to manipulate the direction of light waves, including deflecting them away from the user’s body. 」

  She’s invisible. That’s what it is. But- not perfectly?

  Mirai had come very well prepared. Rin could not see her, and she could not smell her, yet it seemed that the woman was still in the vicinity, waiting for an opening to jab the Limiter deep through her skin. Rin’s clothes were made of thick heavy-duty leather, so the only exposed site was the uncovered back of her neck.

  She whipped around and put both hands up in a cross position just in time to block what felt like Mirai’s arm. Following up with a few jabs Rin lashed out with one leg, but being unable to see what she was aiming at was obviously throwing off every strike.

  “Why are you holding back so much, hmmm?”

  No matter where Rin lunged or how widely she swung it felt as if Mirai was always just out of reach. Gritting her teeth, she came off the offensive for a moment, keeping her eyes focused on the blood beneath both of their feet.

  The little prints of Mirai’s boots appeared as if from a ghost.

  Immediately Rin dropped low to the ground, and she grabbed wildly at the air right above those slight indentations. Something whooshed past her ear, like a hidden blade, and reflexively she jerked to the side as her body hit the ground hard with the movement.

  She took hold of Mirai’s ankle.

  It was surreal; to the naked eye Rin’s hand was gripping tightly around nothing. The moment she made purchase there Rin immediately rolled over, flinging her opponent directly into the wall while scrambling back to her feet again.

  There was a crunch, and blood once invisible now splattered over the wall.

  “Haah…haah…haah…”

  Rin panted harshly, watching that wall closely.

  “You…ahh, ah, you got me!” Though she was still invisible, dust puffed off the wall where the blood had stained it, as if Mirai was trying to support herself. Once again the light warped, revealing a glassy mirage of her blonde hair for a moment. “Ngh, you definitely got me! That hurt… that really, really hurt, you know!”

  Mirai’s voice had lost its previous brightly mocking quality. Now it was thin, strained and dripping with anger.

  Her kinetic ability… it has to be light manipulation. And she’s only affecting herself. Is that it? Can she not do anything else?

  Whatever had been damaged clearly wasn’t fatal. Something solid and sharp flew past Rin’s head and then clattered onto the ground as it melted into view–a small throwing knife. The sight made her uneasy. She had no way of telling how many hidden weapons Mirai carried on her person until they had already been employed against her.

  She started pacing back in an attempt to grab it for herself, only to be stopped by Mirai lunging directly at her throat. If Rin looked out of the corner of her eye, she could just barely see it–the thin needle tip, shining with a ghostly transparent shimmer. Her hands fumbled to lock around Mirai’s wrists only to slip away a moment later as the invisible girl simply jumped away.

  It was a feat of balance to complete such nimble manoeuvres while being unable to see one’s own body, a skill Rin might have appreciated if she weren’t so infuriated by it. Every time she turned she could sense Mirai’s presence flitting behind her, attempting to reach up just enough to jab the back of her neck, her multitudes of bangles and necklaces jingling in metallic chorus.

  Jingling.

  Rin felt her eyes go wide as her head snapped up. In lieu of her other senses, she began to pay attention to her hearing. Wherever Mirai moved, those clinks and rattles shone like a beacon to her position.

  This whole time I’ve been focusing too hard on trying to make her out when she flickers. That’s pointless. I have to focus on….

  Then she shut her eyes, dousing her sight in nothingness.

  “That won’t help you!” Mirai shouted at her. “Are you scared you’ll have to watch yourself die? Don’t worry, I won’t kill you yet! Not for a long while! You have plenty of time to sign a will and testament after I take you back!”

  What a talker, Rin thought. If she hadn’t told me about the Limiter, I wouldn’t be so on guard.

  The world had become dark, but not quiet. Freed from the ardour of trying desperately to see a single flash of Mirai’s form, Rin’s focus narrowed down to a pinprick. Each tiny shift, each little noise. It was something like the way that bats used echolocation to avoid flying into each other at night, only Mirai didn’t even realise just how exposed she was leaving herself.

  Rin envisioned the area in her mind. She recalled where the walls were, where the three steps led down to the way back to where she’d come from, where there was a small railing by the entrance. She knew it like the back of her hand. When she’d first come to the apartment building, Rin had memorised its entire layout, committing every possible escape route to her mind. It had come in handy countless times before, just like it came in handy right now.

  “Idiot girl,” she said, knowing Mirai wouldn’t be able to stop herself from responding. Once more she took up an attacking stance, shifting all of her weight to the edges of her feet.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Mirai ate up the bait exactly as expected.

  “Don’t speak to me like that, bitch!” she snarled, and Rin could hear it perfectly, the woman’s rapid footsteps and voice circling her around and around. A hazy image of her began to form in Rin’s mind, standing directly behind her.

  Behind me-!

  The needle pierced through the soft fabric of Rin’s arm bandages, poking right at the veins in her wrist.

  For the first time, when Rin spun around and threw out a wide left hook, she knew exactly where Mirai was, and the hit connected directly to her shoulder. She followed up relentlessly, doing everything she could to grab the young woman, forcing her back. There was another bodily crack when she kicked Mirai in the ribs, sending her reeling uncontrollably back until she hit the opposite wall a second time.

  The girl was far too weak to withstand Rin’s physical hits for long–that much was clear. She must have relied on staying unseen to keep out of her enemy’s reach. A coward’s play, and an easy one to circumvent now.

  There were the shreds of a sudden idea forming in Rin’s mind. The disjointed concepts started merging together, thoughts racing.

  “What did you do?” Mirai coughed out through her winded chest. Her throat bubbled with every word. “What the hell did you do just now? You can’t see me, can you? Can you?”

  I just need her to panic and shoot me.

  “I don’t need to,” Rin murmured. “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “What’s obvious? What is?” Each word only raised the pitch of Mirai’s voice, as if someone had gotten into her throat and was twisting up the octave dial to its maximum. Through the mask of baking soda, Rin could smell her fear now. The realisation at last that she was in far over her head.

  “I don’t care who you are,” Rin continued softly. She banked wildly on where Mirai was standing and turned her head to face her. The frightened gasp told her she was right. “I don’t care who is protecting you either. I can kill you easily. I’ve just been playing with you this whole time.”

  “No, that–” A scraping noise, likely of Mirai stumbling over her discarded throwing knife. “No, no, no. That’s not true. You were scared of me. You were!”

  “Have you ever thought about your will?” Rin returned, still maintaining that eerily even tone of voice. Mirai was no longer attacking her. From the sounds of it she was circling Rin warily, unwilling to come near her any longer.

  “Are you thinking about it now? What sort of things do you own? Who would you give them to?”

  “Enough!” Mirai shouted over her words. “That’s enough! You’re mocking me, aren’t you? Agh, I just hate women like you! You think you’re better than the younger girls and strut around with all that ridiculous confidence! Father was right to do what he did! He knew what was best, he’ll thank me for this once I show him how much of a mess I’ll make you!”

  Right on the hushed click of the gun’s hammer being cocked back, Rin ducked.

  She timed it just right. The deafening bang shocked her entire system as Mirai fired at her, and the bullet whizzed by and clipped the very edge of Rin’s shoulder. It tore open her jacket and the sweat-soaked shirt beneath and the skin and veins lying beneath that. Blood splattered through the air in a fine red mist.

  There goes her shot.

  Rin would only have one chance to get this right before Mirai would realise what she was planning. Tearing away the bandages on one hand, she clamped the wound with fingers that only trembled a little. The pain felt as if she were being splashed with hot water. Her pulse thundered in her ears. The scarlet fluid leaked between her fingers and began to drip in a gory trail down the curve of her forearm.

  By the sound of it, Mirai stood two paces to the left.

  In a single movement, Rin dashed forward and flung a handful of her own blood in the invisible Mirai’s direction. The woman gave a high-pitched shriek and then began to cough and splutter, gagging and trying to spit it out as her nose and mouth became full of the substance.

  Rin opened her eyes.

  The empty air before her was splattered red. The droplets rolled down invisible curves and planes, soaking into unseen clothing dripping off of unseen hair strands, highlighting Mirai’s now-seen shape as if the blood had been thrown onto a glass statue. She was hunched over, trying and failing to wipe her eyes clean enough to see.

  Got her.

  “Ah- ah, what did-wh-!”

  Before she could Rin had already lunged at her, knocking her to the ground as they both slid a few feet before coming to a stop, and fruitlessly she scrabbled at Rin’s hands to force her off but she was far too heavy and far too strong to budge. Slowly, she began to melt back into view, appearing gradually, revealed to Rin’s eyes like a ghost phasing back into being. She grabbed Mirai’s arm and twisted it harshly until the muscles went slack, dropping her gun with a clatter.

  Rin picked up the weapon. It looked a little toy-like in her hands. Small, maybe tailor-made for Mirai. She pressed the cold barrel against her forehead, smudging her makeup just a bit. She watched the other woman’s eyes widen until her irises were surrounded by white.

  The gun clicked as it was cocked again.

  “So you lied. It was fully loaded.”

  “If you kill me, then father’ll find you!” Mirai writhed like a snake to escape without success. “I swear, he’ll find you–you should know who I am, you should be scared of me, you should be scared! I’m Mirai Fuyoshi! Wait, nonono, please–”

  “Se?tri Sye?trkhavsha,” Rin interrupted. “Recognise that name?”

  She watched Mirai’s face go slack and still, finding no answer.

  “No, no, no I don’t,” she whimpered. A sense of deja vu began to pool in Rin’s stomach, like burning acid.

  Of course you wouldn’t. He was just another ketsujin to you.

  “Then why should I remember yours?”

  Rin pulled the trigger, and this time the bang was muffled.

  When the ringing in her ears went away, she slid the gun into her pocket and stood up again, casting one last look at the tattooed zero on the inside of Mirai’s wrist before walking out of the building.

  The nearest phone box was a twenty-minute walk away.

  During that time, Rin’s pace slowed from a run to a jog to a stumbling trudge. The pain in her hands had returned with a vengeance. Almost enough to eclipse the burning fire that had taken hold of her shoulder, flaying open the nerves and muscles into a throbbing dissection. How strange, she mused, how the greater the pain the faster her brain sought to ignore it.

  Within her jacket Rin grasped the stolen Limiter, before raising it to her hazy vision in examination. She didn't recognise the model, and she couldn't have read the writing on it if she tried. It wasn't the first time somebody had pulled out an illegal Limiter during a fight with her, but this particular device was not the usual cobbled-together, clumsily repurposed mess. The design was compact, sleek, with a neatly hidden activation button and a needle size clearly not taken from any reputable hospital.

  In short, it was custom made.

  If there had been any lingering doubts about Mirai’s identity, that neatly dispelled the last of them. There was only one person in Suzumachi who could afford to hand out custom-made Limiters. She buckled it safely back into the large hanging pouch on her thigh.

  “Ahh…hahh…haah…”

  Rin was losing blood, but she was losing it at a slow and controlled rate; and to her that was just as well as losing no blood at all. Her destination was minutes away. If she were to make it, the minor detail of her wellbeing would soon follow suit.

  Ever since Suzumachi’s district funding had been cut in 1970 or so the public payphones had suffered. Now their once bright and proud paint was faded and peeling, and the doors were stuck closed nine booths out of ten. It was an uncared-for district, and it showed in the potholes and the overflowing public bins like the bruises on a neglected child.

  For the second time that week Rin ripped a door off its hinges. As it spun in circles across the road, she attempted to squeeze into the cramped space without success, only hitting her head upon the ceiling for her trouble. This isn't just too small for ketsujin, she thought, it's too small for anyone older’n twelve.

  Some of the button caps were missing. Resigning herself to leaning sideways into the booth, Rin reached in with her only free hand, a crumpled piece of paper clutched in her bloodied fingers.

  She didn’t know if Yugi had a phone. She didn’t even know if he owned anything at all; but she did have Dexter’s number, and that was her only shot at getting in contact with the enigmatic pale-haired angel.

  Boy, she corrected herself, but the insistence seemed hollow now. The image of writhing living wires floated behind her eyes.

  “Dammit, dammit, fuck.” Her fingers slipped off the buttons, and it was hard to see through the sweat rolling into her eyes. She cursed in Ketsugo under her breath, swearing the payphone to a painful and lonely death on the floor of a whorehouse.

  And then, unexpectedly, somebody spoke.

  “Did you know the electricity for that booth has been cut?”

  Rin immediately wrenched herself out of the booth, swinging in a wide arc with her arm with the small hidden blade popping back out as soon as she activated the mechanism. A bright pain exploded behind her eyes as she collided into the roof again. When the cloudy whiteness receded from her vision, Rin realised that the words she’d heard had issued from the short, white-clad figure of Yugi standing a few feet away from her on the pavement.

  He was wearing slightly more clothes now than the last time they’d spoken–a fine knit white cardigan and shapeless white trousers that looked as if he’d stolen a size above his own from somebody else’s closet. It didn’t quite fit his image, somehow. Rin would have expected a mysterious dark robe or some sort of angelic uniform (not that she knew what that would have looked like)–not attire so painfully bland.

  Tilting his head to the side, Yugi clasped his hands behind his back and regarded her like a curious bird.

  After a short silence, Rin said, “I was going to ask for you.”

  “There’s no need.”

  “I know that now, why the hell are you here?”

  He walked over to the payphone as Rin fully extricated herself, proceeding to clamber rapidly up the side until he was perched like a gargoyle on top of it.

  “Well–to keep an eye on you, of course,” said Yugi as if it were the most natural thing in the world to stalk women that he’d only spoken to once. He wrapped both arms around his knees and began to fiddle idly with the cloth of his trousers.

  “I followed you home after our first meeting together. I had already guessed that there was a risk you would be targeted by an anti-ketsujin squad; I didn’t expect it to happen this soon.”

  His analytical gaze was fixated right at the very centre of Rin’s pupils; and a silence fell over the two of them once more while Yugi watched her, coming to some sort of internal conclusion.

  Eventually he said evenly, “You are aware that you murdered the daughter of Zero Hand.”

  “It wasn’t hard to guess. His children toss around their last names as if it’ll buy them everything they want and get them anything they need.” She began to unwind her arm wrappings, pressing the grimy fabric into her wounded shoulder with a faint hiss through her teeth. “You say you were keeping an eye on me, but that girl gave me some trouble. Didn’t feel like helping me, va?”

  She was only challenging his own attitude, really. In truth Rin would’ve been insulted had he appeared out of nowhere to put Mirai conveniently to sleep. Perhaps he knew that trait of hers.

  “I knew that you wouldn’t die to such a weak apostate. I only wished to watch you fight.” Yugi’s gaze slid over to her shoulder, where the thin bandages had already become sodden. “But she injured you.”

  “Only because I needed her to.” The image of gore splattered across the glassy air re-entered her mind’s eye.

  Yugi reached down to his cardigan, beginning to unzip the front until it hung open off of his slender willowy form. Gathering one parted corner into his hand, he leaned down until it hovered right above the scraped-raw flesh, red and shiny in the reflection from the nearby streetlight.

  He cast a shadow across Rin’s body as the pristine white fabric made contact with the bullet graze, and immediately a rose of bright red bloomed through his cardigan, glazing his fingertips in dampness. She tensed, but not a sign of dangerous intent came from him. His psychofield was low frequency, face calm and serene.

  “You and I have our interests in the same place,” Yugi spoke softly. “Have you made your decision now?”

  Rin looked up as the light of the streetlamp cascaded down from behind Yugi’s head in harsh, fluorescent rays. His eyes were the only feature of his face that stood out–reflecting the glow from her shiny leather jacket, they resembled the headlights of an oncoming car.

  Her bandaged fingers gripped his wrist, swallowing the fragile limb whole, but he did not flinch a millimetre.

  “You bring me to Zero Hand,” she murmured, “And I’ll bring you his heart in my teeth.”

  Yugi’s pale face broke into a smile, and for the first time the skin beneath his eyes creased with it.

  FORMATION ARC - END