Chapter 161: Chapter 26
The clinical silence of the school infirmary was usually a sanctuary of sterility and quiet, but for Retsu, it was a theater for her dark obsessions.
She sat perched on the edge of a dical cot, her bento box open beside her, completely srized by the flickering screen of a tablet.
It was a docuntary on the subterranean wars of rival ant colonies—thousands of tiny, mindless soldiers tearing each other apart for the expansion of their queen’s territory.
Watching the mindless violence while chewing her food had always been her ritual of peace; it was the only way she could drown out the static of a world that felt increasingly loud and fake.
Suddenly, her head tilted, her pupils dilating as she felt through the thick concrete walls, a flicker of Ki brushed against her senses.
It was a familiar, regal signature, currently clashing with a jagged, greasy anomaly of spirit energy.
"Rindou, huh..." Retsu muttered, her voice sounded so hollow and cold. "Maybe she’ll die from that anomaly..."
She whispered the hope into the air like a prayer, but the logic in her brain quickly crushed such impossible hope.
Rindou was a talented and powerful Ki practitioner; she wouldn’t fall to a low-tier parasite.
The thought of that woman caused Retsu’s fingers to twitch convulsively as her killing intent, a dense and suffocating miasma, flared out of her body with the force of a physical explosion.
The light in her blue eyes died, leaving behind two empty, sapphire voids.
She gripped her face with one hand, her fingernails digging into her skin as if she were trying to peel away the very mask of her sanity.
She couldn’t understand it. How had that Rindou girl—that background ornant—suddenly beco "real"?
In Retsu’s world, most people were re shadows, flickering ghosts of no consequence, just a re NPC in a ga people like to call reality.
But lately, a terrifying phenonon was occurring: Rindou was beginning to "exist."
Not just her, but almost everyone who entered Seijirou’s orbit was crystallizing into a solid, undeniable reality.
They were no longer fake, now they had weight, they had presence, they... Exist.
Actually, she had even began to avoid Seijirou and his circle entirely, terrified of the monster living under her skin as she feared that if she spent one more second in their presence, she would do sothing that Seijirou would find unforgivable—and the thought of his hatred was the only thing more painful than her own existence.
Why do they have to exist? she scread internally, her breathing coming in ragged, shallow gasps. Why can’t they just remain fake? If they were just dolls, I wouldn’t feel this heart-wrenching jealousy!
Jealousy. Yes, that’s right. If before, those girls were playthings to Seijirou to play with, now they were ’rivals’, sothing Retsu couldn’t accept.
And aside from jealousy, deep down, she was actually terrified of them. It was a severe case of automatonophobia, an extre fear of a ’thing’ suddenly becoming ’alive’, watching you, imitation you, and even acting like you.
Since she was born, she was surrounded by these fake people, but they’re just that, fakes, but now...they are starting to feel ’alive’.
And it was ... terrifying.
So terrifying that she wanted to destroy all of them.
Just then, the door to the clinic slid open with a sharp clack as Miyamura Hana stepped inside, her expression devoid of its usual bubbly warmth.
She looked at the distorted atmosphere of the room, her eyes hardening as they landed on Retsu.
"Retsu, what are you doing?" Hana asked, her voice tight with authority as she walked toward her. "Your sickening Ki is starting to leak. It’s affecting the students in the nearby classrooms."
Retsu shifted her gaze, and much to her horror, Hana form was also beginning to flicker, solidifying into that sa unbearable reality.
She was becoming "real" too.
And at that mont, her fear and sanity had reached a breaking point, and before she could even think, her hand moved faster than the human eye could track.
A thin, silver acupuncture needle appeared between her fingers as she lunged, aiming for the center of Hana’s forehead with lethal precision.
But Hana’s reflexes were just as sharp, and she caught Retsu’s wrist inches from her face, the needle a re centiters from hitting her, the impact creating a localized ripple of air.
Hana frowned, her grip tightening until the bones in Retsu’s wrist groaned. "What are you doing, Retsu!? Snap out of it!"
Retsu didn’t pull away, and she simply stared at Hana with those empty, lightless blue eyes before her lips curled into an incredibly eerie, uncanny smile that didn’t reach her face.
Hana shivered seeing that incredibly familiar smile.
"Calm down, you idiot!" Hana growled, and without a shred of hesitation, she channeled a surge of golden electricity from her palm directly into Retsu’s nervous system.
"Urgh!" Retsu flinched as the high-voltage Ki forced her muscles to spasm.
Instantly, she slapped Hana’s hand away and scrambled back, her chest heaving as she fought to rein in the darkness of her heart.
She took a long, shaky breath, the static in her head slowly receding.
Hana stood her ground, watching her warily. "Are you okay? You’ve been getting more and more crazy since you returned with Seijirou from his training. That trip changed sothing in you."
Retsu let out a long, weary sigh, her eyes finally regaining a flicker of their natural color. "Yeah... don’t worry. I can handle it. Just... just don’t co near
right now. I’m afraid I wouldn’t be able to resist the urge to kill you."
Hana’s brow furrowed at the blatant threat, but she gave a slow, asured nod.
After all, Retsu was really capable of killing her.
"Anyway, keep your Ki suppressed. A dozen students nearby have already started feeling dizzy and nauseous. So of them have started throwing up in the hallways."
"Yeah, yeah," Retsu whispered, covering her face with one hand while dismissively waving the other toward the door. "Now leave
alone. Before I really do kill you."
Hana sighed, looking at the broken woman one last ti. "Very well."
She turned and exited the clinic, leaving Retsu alone with her ants docuntary and her encroaching, agonizing reality.
*
*
*
Back to Rindou.
The Student Council President stared at the two people in front of her, her usually calm eyes suddenly becoming colder and colder every second.
"P-Prez..." The fat student stamred, his sweaty face pale as he scrambled backward on all fours. "W-We, we were just enjoying our alone ti... I know this is a bit of an inappropriate place, s-sorry... it’s just young love, right?"
Rindou didn’t offer the rcy of a reply.
She just slowly approached them with her steady, predatory advance, and the pressure of her ki was so imnse that the student let out a pathetic shriek, his legs giving out as he stumbled down hard on his butt.
As he fell, a slim, leather-bound black notebook slipped from the inner pocket of his blazer and skittered across the linoleum.
Rindou’s eyes, trained for the smallest opening in a duel, imdiately locked onto the object and saw the gold-embossed lettering on the cover: "Sex Note."
The student’s eyes bulged as he lunged forward, his greasy fingers scratching at the floor as he tried to cover the book with his body and shove it back into his uniform.
"What is that?" Rindou’s voice had dropped an octave, freezing the air in the hallway. "Show it to . Now!"
"Hiieee!" The boy let out a shriek of pure horror, and without even trying to explain, he scrambled to his feet and turned to bolt down the corridor.
"Not so fast!"
Unfortunately, he didn’t make it pass two steps as Rindou moved like a sudden gale, a blur of blue and white that appeared instantly in his path.
She didn’t draw her shinai; she reached out, grabbed the back of his head with an iron grip, and slamd his face directly into the hard floor.
"AAHH!" The sound of the impact was sickening, causing the student to let out a pained scream.
Rindou looked down at him with a gaze of utter revulsion. "Don’t even think of escaping."
She had briefly considered pinning him down with her boot, but she heard that for so people, getting stepped on was a reward.
And she would not grant this creature even a hint of satisfaction.
"Hiieee! P-Prez! I-I didn’t do anything wrong! Please spare !" The boy wailed, his nose bleeding onto the tiles.
Rindou stood over him, her silhouette tall and imposing, pointing her shinai at his throat. "The notebook. Show it to ."
Shivering with a rhythmic, frantic fright, the student nodded like a pecking chicken, and with trembling hands, he reached into his jacket, pulled out the notebook, and offered it to her as if it were a holy relic.
Rindou snatched it with one hand, keeping the wooden tip of her weapon leveled at his eyes.
"Sex Note..." she muttered, flipping the cover open.
The paper felt like dried skin, cold and repulsive, and on the first page, she found the instructions written in a flowing, elegant script that stood in stark contrast to the book’s na:
[Write the full na of your target. Detail the specific sexual acts you wish them to perform. Within ten minutes, the subject will execute the written scenario without deviation.]
Rindou’s eyes turned to shards of ice.
She flipped into the next page, and her disgust simply overflowed. This trash actually first tried it with his own mother! And had even used it on his little sister!
The poor girl was only in middle school!
She glared at the student, the sheer weight of her killing intent making him wet himself. "How did you get this thing?"
"I-It fell from the sky!" he shrieked, his voice cracking. "I-I just happened to pick it up! I didn’t know! I just wanted... I just wanted to be loved!"
"Tsk. You deserve to die," Rindou clicked her tongue in profound loathing.
Then, she gripped the edges of the notebook, her knuckles whitening as she prepared to rip the cursed thing into confetti.
But as she applied pressure, a thick, oily black miasma erupted from the spine of the book.
It hissed like a nest of snakes, the darkness so foul that Rindou’s instincts scread for her to retreat.
She let go of the book and perford a sharp, mid-air backflip to gain distance, landing in a perfect fighting stance.
The miasma didn’t dissipate; it swirled and grew, coalescing into the silhouette of a pitch-black humanoid.
It looked like a humanoid liquid, its surface rippling with countless unblinking eyes and wet, pink mouths that constantly opened and closed, licking their lips in a synchronized, sickening rhythm.
The sight was a biological insult to a human being, and Rindou felt a wave of nausea hit her, her stomach churning at the sheer wrongness of the entity.
"A-Ah, Kami-sama! Please save ! Save !" The fat student, blinded by his own terror, crawled toward the entity and grabbed its shapeless, oily feet. "You gave
the book! Protect your master!"
The entity tilted its head—a movent that looked like a slow-motion collapse of its neck—and focused its many eyes on the boy.
Before Rindou could even react, one of the entity’s mouths expanded with a wet, tearing sound as it lunged forward and swallowed the student whole, bones and all, in a single, fluid gulp.
The entity’s throat undulated as it chewed, followed by a loud, wet burp that echoed through the silent hallway.
The sound acted like a bucket of ice water, snapping Rindou out of her daze.
Instantly, her regal blue Ki erupted around her like a solar flare, pushing back the encroaching shadows.
The air began to vibrate with a humming sound as her Origin: The Order, fully activated.
"Entity who ca to disrupt the order of the human world," Rindou declared, her voice resonating with divine authority as she gripped her shinai with both hands. "I will cut you down and return you to the nothingness you crawled out of."
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