Nana
She blinked once.
Kagami was already standing between them. The skinny girl’s head swung from his right grip by a fistful of red hair. Her body hadn’t fallen yet.
One.
His sleeve was gone. Torn or burned, Nana couldn’t tell.
Fresh blood ran down the fingers. Steaming. Hissing where it dripped onto the kitchen tile.
"Huh," the fat man said.
Then the severed head spoke.
"Wow, you’re fast."
Nana’s knees hit the floor. The pot was still in her hands. She didn’t rember deciding to keep holding it.
Kagami was already moving. His fingers went into the hole in the fat man’s chest, the empty space where organs should have been.
He tore.
Blood. Tendons. Bone. The fat man split down the middle like wet paper. One half hit the kitchen sink. The other slid across the floor and stopped against Nana’s knee.
Two.
Warm. It was warm.
"Oh." Kagami looked at the halves. At the blood on his arm. "I overestimated."
He turned to Nana. His face hadn’t changed. Sa flat expression from the van. Sa nothing behind the eyes.
He seed disappointed.
"Let’s go—"
"Fatty." The severed head. Still talking. Still smiling with lips that shouldn’t work anymore. "Stop playing dead."
A grunt. From the halves on the floor.
Nana looked down. The at was moving. Pulling itself together. The fat man’s face, half of it, grinned up at her from beside her knee.
"Ka. Boom."
The geotry on the fat man’s skin scread. Not a sound, but a jagged vibration that made Nana’s teeth ache. Then it ignited.
Kagami’s right hand moved.
[Perfect Cube]
Glass that wasn’t glass. A box of nothing solid, snapping into existence around her. Around him. Around the pot she was still holding because her fingers had forgotten how to let go.
The apartnt exploded.
Sound died. The roar of ignition, the crack of splitting walls, all of it collapsing into a muffled hum. Like being underwater. Like being nowhere at all.
Fire crawled over the barrier’s surface. Orange and white and screaming hot.
The walls were gone.
The ceiling was gone.
Mio’s hoodie on the chair was gone.
Heat bled through anyway. Not the flas, just the pressure of them. The air inside the cube turning thick and hard to breathe.
"Little brat." Kagami said, close. "Breathe."
She was holding her breath. He’d told her to, before.
"You can stop now."
She breathed. It hurt.
The flas kept coming. She could see the building’s skeleton through them, rebar and concrete, glowing cherry-red. The other apartnts. The hallway. The stairs she’d climbed a hundred tis.
All of it burning.
"The barrier will hold," Kagami said. "Forty seconds. Then we move."
Forty seconds. She could count that. She was good at counting. It was the only thing keeping her here.
Three. Four. Five.
The severed head was still out there. She could see it through the flas: red hair blackening, skin bubbling, mouth still moving.
Still smiling. Like the fire was a minor inconvenience.
Twelve. Thirteen.
"They’ll regenerate," Kagami said. Not to her. To himself, maybe. "Annoying."
Twenty. Twenty-one.
The fat man’s halves were crawling toward each other. Through the fire. at knitting back together, geotry flickering beneath charred skin. His face reford first, grinning before he had lips to grin with.
Twenty-eight. Twenty-nine.
Nana looked at the pot in her hands. Her arms were shaking. Had been shaking. The ceramic was warm against her cramping fingers. The soil inside was dry.
The moonpetals were fine.
Thirty-five.
"Ti." Kagami’s hand found her shoulder. The right one. It was cold. "Don’t look back."
The barrier dropped.
He grabbed her against his chest and jumped.
Four floors. The fire escape was gone. Twisted tal rained down around them. The building’s face had caved in, concrete and rubble spilling into the street like a gutted animal.
Kagami took the impact in a crouch, Nana’s feet never touching the ground. He set her down. Her legs buckled anyway, but he was already dragging her forward, away from the collapse.
The van was flattened. A slab of concrete had pancaked it into the street, glass and tal scattered in a twenty-ter radius.
Block-leveler. The word surfaced from sowhere. News reports. Military briefings she’d seen on TV.
Half the building was gone. The other half was burning.
"Kagami-san."
"Keep moving."
"Kagami-san."
"What."
"You killed them." She squeezed his cold hand. "And they didn’t die."
He stopped. Looked at her. Really looked, for the first ti since the van.
For the first ti, sothing moved behind his eyes.
"No," he said. "They didn’t."
The word settled between them.
"Keep up."
He kept moving. She followed.
Sirens in the distance. People screaming sowhere. Nana couldn’t see them; dust and smoke turned the street into fog.
She counted her steps instead.
One. Two. Three—
Kagami suddenly stopped.
"Keep running, Nana."
She heard the slightest octave in his throat. Sothing she hadn’t heard before.
"What?"
"End of the block. Crowd. Stay with people." He wasn’t looking at her. "Go."
She nodded. Her legs moved. Her arms held the pot. Her brain had gone sowhere else.
Her footsteps faded into the smoke.
***
Kagami
Now then.
He turned.
They erged from the rubble behind him. Fatty’s silhouette first, bulk reforming, skin knitting over exposed muscle, steam rising from flesh that shouldn’t be alive. Then Skinny, head tilting at an angle that spines shouldn’t allow.
The geotry on Fatty’s skin was building again. Faint hum. Heat shimr warping the air around his bulk.
Skinny unwrapped the silk from her face.
No eyes. Just light. Burning white where sockets should be.
"9 seconds, was it? Want to count again?"
"Corpses don’t speak."
People around them had already evacuated. Sirens blared a few blocks down. More than enough ti.
It’s a sha. He really did like this suit.
However, so things can’t be helped.
The fat man was whole again. Grinning. The girl beside him, light burning where her eyes should be.
Two regenerators. Block-level firepower. And they wanted the little brat.
"Fatty, level the street."
"Ka—"
Kagami exhaled.
His right arm split open, t by the fat man’s response.
"—boom."
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