Common I – Raidou Kuzunoha XXI Vs. The Napoleon of Crime

Victor's Monster

20XX.

Trailing behind each labored step is a thick trail of blood, and with it the slow but steady separation of the soul from Saito's body. The washing pole that had once impaled him has become a crutch and his only means of moving onward. He grips the hilt with everything that he has while his legs continue to slowly fall apart.

His wounds have not healed. In fact they have only become more severe with each passing hour. And so the hours passed, each bringing him closer to the grim realization that the very blade he now had to rely upon to survive was tainted with a vile darkness, a curse beyond even that of the Grendel's flesh, and one that tore away at his insides. Even once he managed to remove the blade the pain did not subside – Yusuke Kitagawa's single strike was meant to be both his first and final, and upon closer inspection of the broken edge, the blade itself was embedded with a thin line of silver – silver that was no doubt the source of the impossibly fast spreading infection gripping his body.

It's only a matter of time now. His insides erode into nothing as the dark haze imbued within the blade washes over his entire body, his skin turns black, his nerves rotting away into nothing. Already his legs don't move the way they should, and before too long will be fully cut off from the rest of him. And that'll be the end. The only thing he can do is helplessly move forward.

The escalator seems so far away. It takes an eternity for him to clear an expanse of twelve feet, and even longer to clear the next.

The image of the girl that took Fumi is burned into his brain. He remembers her, and it lines up with everything he's heard. Somewhere in the back of his mind – he knows that she's Hinawa Isshiki. But that's not possible. There was simply no way. She was gone before he was even old enough to remember much about her. And given that simple fact -

Who on earth is Fumi Togo? How could she have been the love of Hinawa Isshiki's life?

Everything is a lie.

Everything he knows about this Mementos is a lie.

His blood boils. And so he keeps moving. His innards are slowly being unwound like a thread, but it doesn't stop him.

At last the escalator is just in front of him. His attempt to drag himself onto it is met only with failure as he tumbled down the escalator face first, gripping the hilt of the katana for dear life. Sprawled out on the hard riveted metal of the escalator steps one of his legs is now broken, along with a section of his back. Trying to move causes nothing but intense pain. And so he lets the escalator carry him off further into the depths.

The base is surrounded by a vast, endless body of water. At first he braces himself to be submerged, but the escalator comes to an abrupt end and spits him out onto the water's surface. Much to his surprise, he doesn't sink – while the water is doubtlessly real and soaks his ragged form, he is able to walk upon it.

The katana can't find decent footing on top of the liquid surface – unlike Saito himself the blade passes below the water's edge, albeit with enough apparent resistance that he can pull himself along as long as he doesn't stay in one place for too long.

Out in the distance, a hazy figure. It's a woman, with blonde hair and blue eyes, draped in a green flower dress that seems a little worse for wear. At first it looks like she's sitting in perfect seiza, but as he gets closer he can see her legs at her side in a reclining position – she's injured. One leg is cut open.

Once he's close enough she finally takes notice of him. Her shoulders shift unnaturally, just slightly enough for him to notice. Her head tilts backward, her eyes start to focus on him. She smiles warmly.

No. It's all wrong.

"Come closer." She beckons. "For you to have made it this far, you've earned your rest. You look like you're in terrible pain – yes, surely even you know, your body won't last, not like that."

She isn't wrong. But – something's off. He knows right away, but what options does he even have? He has to keep pressing onward. The exit isn't even in view yet. Despite the endless vastness of that lake, there was only one direction he could really go in.

He decides shortly before he's upon her. Once he's close enough, he'll run her through with the washing pole. He can't afford to take any chances.

The blade stop sinking through the water, which suddenly becomes like a hard surface. With newfound stability Saito steadies himself as much as he can. The woman is almost directly beneath him with that empty smile on her face. He can lung forward and pierce her with the blade from right where he is.

It's at that moment his right leg finally gives out entirely, and his crippled form slumps against the blade holding him up. He puts as much strength into his lower back as he can – but it's no use. He collapses then and there, his right leg having rotted away almost entirely at the kneecap, revealing tainted, black bone beneath.

Blood gushes from the newly formed gap, but very slowly, like there's something holding it back. The woman takes hold, resting his head in her lap. Her fingers run through his hair and against his dying skin. She takes hold of one of his bony hands, resting it firmly against her chest. But her cold outer flesh betrays her true nature. Saito's other hand reaches outward, and as it does her fingers drift down the length of his arm. She seems to shudder as his fingers touch the nape of her neck. But once again – there's something off. It's like an imitation. Someone reacting to his touch without really feeling it at all.

It's beyond obvious. This is the third fallen angel, the latest of the Erebus Squad's number. A serene affection inches its way across her face – a façade. A facsimile of what it is to be human.

"Rest easy, my beloved." She whispers softly. "It's my purpose to keep you safe. Always." Her eyes try their hardest to match the love and affection in her voice. But they simply can't.

She knows what a woman is supposed to be. From her touch to the way her chest rises and falls – she has it all down to an exact science. She knows where to seem vulnerable, where to be delicate, where to be firm.

"I am Gabriel." She murmurs softly. "I was born to protect you. It's my fate to ease your pain. And it's my sole desire to keep you safe. I can see it in your eyes – you still want to walk this tainted path. But all that waits at the end is more pain. You'll never become the King of this squalid Mementos. It's a fool's errand in principle."

"This city is mine." He groans, like a mantra. Words. They're just words. He kept going till his body fell apart. And so it did. And here he is, at this porcelain doll's mercy. His words don't change that.

"It's an admirable sentiment." She says, stroking his face. "Someone willing to take ownership – to take responsibilityfor this failed state. But surely you must have realized it by now - that fate isn't meant for you. There's someone else meant to take the throne. You know their name. And somewhere deep down I can feel it – you know why it must be them."

Her words as soft as they are serve as a sharp poison. At first his upper body squirms. But it's of no consequence.

She holds him tightly, the poison still passing from her lips. Maybe she can read his mind. Maybe she's simply all-knowing. But it doesn't really matter. Understanding that changes nothing. "Your body succumbs, yet your mind is still fighting a war that the rest of you can't keep up with. Dojima is right. These sins aren't yours. You don't have to take responsibility for even one of them. Let the sinners atone, let the damned be damned – they'll just step all over you, all over again. You've seen it, on every scale. You saw it in the pit. You saw it in that woman's eye when she turned on you. You understand that reality better than anyone else."

"There's still people… That want to fight." His voice catches in his throat.

"Ahh, yes. Of course. The little waif. I've seen it all. You think she'll come back to you? You saw the look in her eyes. She's long gone – she was already gone. From the very beginning, and it was never going to last. Her world was mired in the premise of another story, one you barely had any part in, from the moment you met her. She won't throw that away, not now that the ghost of her past has come to carry her off in their arms." The woman strokes his hair. Her touch is ice cold, the tips of her fingers stinging his rough scalp. "Don't let her break you. Don't let the idea of someone willing to take your side distract you from the truth. Fumiyo Togo will always choose Hinawa Isshiki. It's not a choice for her, and love rarely is. That's how she was made. But you – you were always different. You were born for a different world – a world better than this one." She leans in close, whispering straight into his ear. "That girl was meant for this failed state. Her blood is tainted, her soul is tainted. She was born from a line of a lawless people, and every day of her life she honored their tradition, as the seed of the most reviled man in your city."

His eyes widen slightly at her sudden revelation.

"Yes, indeed. Togo is her mother's name. She's the child of that man – she was born Fumiyo Amamiya. A bride fit for the devil… Let her mate with that creeping horror, that empty shell of her past life. Her sins far outweigh your own."

Somehow, it doesn't come as a shock to him. Somehow, he really knew all along. The resemblance was certainly there. And that blazing fire in her eyes – it really couldn't have come from anywhere else.

He knows Ren Amamiya very well. The foremost special agent of The Twins, the closest confidant of his own mother and her sister during their efforts to reform Japanese politics. There was no task too difficult for that man to perform, no duty entrusted to him that went unfulfilled.

Ren Amamiya killed Naoto Shirogane over twenty years ago, on no one's orders but his own. And that single incident led to the Red Crossing at Shibuya Station Square, the end of everything. His mother escaped from those days with her reputation and most importantly her life still intact. His aunt Sae did not. Nor did his father.

"Think of what life would be like." She continues. "Imagine if your father was still here. Maybe your mother wouldn't have been forced to raise you alone. Think of all the times she told you, how much she missed your father, how much she wishes the two of you could've known each other. The famine, the riots, the killings – look at Yusuke Kitagawa, one of his closest friends, a husk of a man, homeless, broken, trailing behind the ghost of his daughter. All of that lies on Ren Amamiya's shoulders. You know it's true. And his child is just the same."

The day Naoto Shirogane was killed, everything was turned upside down. What had been a deeply flawed and fragile administration in Tokyo quickly unraveled into a hopeless chaos, one from which the city never fully recovered. And in that chaos his family was destroyed.

His mother loved that man. She loved him so much that her heart was screaming, each and every day. Even after he was born, even after she chose to be with his father, she never fully moved on.

And Fumi was the child that he had, with the woman he chose over Makoto Nijima. That they had separated over.

There is not one man on this Earth that Saito hates more than Ren Amamiya.

Ren Amamiya is the reason – the sole reason why either of them exist. It's divine punishment. The true penance for what Saito did in the apartment that fateful night – that he would be irreversibly bound to that man's daughter.

"Stay with me." Gabriel exhales softly, letting out a gentle sigh. "Here, in this perpetual moment. You don't have to be disappointed anymore. You don't have to spend each and every waking moment tormenting yourself over a child you never held, over a woman that will just betray you."

All he has left to guide his actions with is tremendous pain. The truth had finally started to out itself from the depths of this rotten Mementos. And with each revelation another part of him that he thought was lost forever returns.

It was just like Dojima had said. He'd been embroiled in a plot that had seen itself to its harrowing end before he was even six years old, its players all left either broken or dead. For even Hinawa Isshiki to have appeared, it was clear that no matter the conditions for this endless battle royale, everyone that had made it this far did so for one reason. Whoever was behind it all, whoever that 'Joker' truly was, it was their intent to bring all those that took part in the Death of Governor Shirogane to the depths of Mementos from the beginning.

But despite all of that -

His choice is clear as day.

All these people trying to insist that he's different. That he's somehow better. It's all so stupid. And quite frankly, he's had just about enough of it.

His fingers at last find their way around Gabriel's frail neck. His grip is weak and feeble, but it still carries that profound defiance.

"I'd rather get fucked up the ass." He snarls.

Gabriel's face contorts for but a moment, and in that moment he can see the truth of that calm, endless ocean.

A blasted wasteland, a gaping hole in the train tracks off the edge of the platform. Piles and piles of corpses strewn about everywhere, dead Persona users trapped in their own perpetual moment. Corpses with beaming gazes, the happiest faces there could ever be. And Gabriel's face, a black skull, her thighs jutting into his back with sharp metallic edges. She's just like the two that came before her. Then in the blink of an eye the truth is gone, and the gorgeous woman is in front of him once more, her hands gently gliding over his face, as she suddenly jams her fingers into his eye-sockets.

As the android tears out his eyes, through the unspeakable pain, rather than a scream of agony, or a cry of betrayal, or even an angry howl – Saito's bloodied mouth twists into a delighted grin, and baring his shattered teeth, he lets out a delighted wail.

"That's right, break it all, you worthless bitch!" Saito cackles. "You think you can talk my ear off for fifteen fucking minutes and it somehow puts you on the level of the Virgin Mother? I swear to god you women are all the fucking same!"

"I won't abide this foolishness, not even from you."

"Eat shit. If I wanted a woman as clingy as you I'd date a college junior."

Veiled in darkness, his fractured form is sent hurtling away, crashing into the jagged floor below. His eyes are gone, but he can tell his arms were fractured severely from the impact. He is a corpse in everything but name.

"If I show you, then you'll understand. Watch – see what the world looks like, through someone else's eyes."

Suddenly that darkness is engulfed in a blinding white light.

Then, moments later, he can see again.

It looks like Yoyogi Park. When he was dating Maho, they used to come here all the time. It's a bright, sunny day. There's a woman standing there, no older than twenty, with light brown hair in a pure white dress, wearing a matching white hat. She has a pink bag hanging from her shoulder.

Tell me, Saito Nijima. Who's eyes are these eyes? Gabriel's voice echoes in his mind.

The girl turns back to face him. Her face is obscured from his vision.

Tell me who that is.

You know who it is.

You know where this is. When this happened.

It's a simple thing that people are born thinking they're entitled to.

This was stolen from you. Stolen from you by the world you're trying to protect.

And not one of them cares.

Not one of them will ever care. They'll tear this away from you again and again just so they can keep it for themselves. She's so close to you right now, isn't she? You can feel her breath against you, can't you? There's nothing in the world you want more than this.

Being king of this is pointless. It all just needs to be burned away. Let the True King of Mementos take the throne.

THIS is the fight you wanted, understand? You have no next move. You can resist pointlessly all you want and die all you want. But this is the real world. That won't change anything. Things don't go the way you want to out of sheer force of will or belief. There's only what you have, which is nothing, and what was stolen from you, which is everything.

"Yeah, it sure looks that way, doesn't it?"

The vision ends. His broken body twists and turns, and through an almighty struggle, he begins to move. The Flesh of the Grendel, rapidly regenerating and breaking down just as quickly, a process of ceaseless, intense pain. Saito's sharp movements in the brief moments his broken limbs have tangible form once more make him seem more like a specter drifting toward its prey. "Again and again, you all keep making the same stupid mistake -"

Gabriel is invaded by the foreign presence – Saito's body is like an invasive parasite, the decaying lumps of skin and the red fire seeping from the gaps in his body wrapping around the android like tentacles, melding with the android's outer shell and peeling it apart layer by layer intertwining itself with everything beneath the surface. Gabriel cries out in protest, but with his one good hand, he pries open her mouth and shoves his hand straight down the android's throat. His hand wraps firmly around the Plume of Dusk within. "You all think you know exactly what everyone wants, how everyone thinks, like you've got a fucking manual for the human condition. What conceited bullshit…!"

His hand tightens around the Plume. For the machine it's the closest thing to experiencing true pain there is.

"How is this possible…?" The android's voice feebly stutters through a damaged speaker.

"You keep talking about peace and calm like they're as precious as gold. You insist on preaching about sins and responsibility – about equality as though there was any meaning to the fucking word. Here's some real words of wisdom – you don't get to decide a single goddamn thing anymore. Not for anyone else, and sure as shit not for yourself. You lost that right the minute you started talking all this pretentious shit, and there's no amount of pain you can inflict, there's no amount of skin and bone you can carve away, not a single solitary thing you can do to earn it back. You've got no chance in hell of stopping what's coming. Thinking that retribution would somehow end if you killed just one fucking person – now that's the real foolishness."

"You're wrong." The android's emotionless voice echoes. "You're already broken. You just can't see it."

"As if." Saito brings his face as close to the android's as he can. "You've seen it, haven't you? In all the people you killed before me, in everyone else that made it to this point? But it was your little story proved it. Even if I die someone else will end up right back here in my place, even if they don't want it, it's fucking inevitable. You can kill us over and over and over, but we won't stop coming. Meanwhile here you are, all by yourself at the edge of fucking eternity waiting for someone to come along and prove you right. You've got no ambition, not the tiniest scrap of humanity whatsoever – yeah, like hell I'm going to let someone like you do me in, fuck that!"

The android's body begins to shake violently, the speaker giving a violent whir. And then with a vicious eruption the android's body separates at the seams, limb after limb bursting out of place as Saito's cursed flesh bursts through every one of its openings. What's left of Gabriel tumbles to the ground, and the android lies still.

He's sprawled out on the ground, the android defeated, but he's in no winning condition himself.

Parts of his body won't regenerate fully anymore. The curse of the blade still takes its toll, eating away at his body even now. But now he understands – he'd suspected this from the moment his right leg fell apart the way that it did. The curse attacks the skin and bone – it eats away at the cage holding his nerves and organs in place. All he has to do then, is constantly grow back just enough to graft his innermost flesh to something that won't rot away. That way, his nerves and tendons will remain right where they are. And now, he has the perfect replacement for everything else.

It's a race against time, of which he has very little to create a mountain of achievement. He starts with Gabriel's right leg. Everything below his knee needs to be replaced. It takes countless failed attempts, but eventually he grows back just enough to firmly move the leg around. The android's parts adapt to his innards quite well, the black bone that comprises Gabriel's entire exterior mysteriously similar to what his own ruined bones are like now.

As he works away at his right leg, his right arm falls off from the elbow down. No matter.

It's a little harder to graft his fingers. At first he can't ball his hand into a fist, so he tries again and again. Gabriel's right arm is made of the same material as the leg, so it's harder to conceptualize things like tendons. He has to regrow a bit more of his own arm to compensate. But eventually he works it out.

Then the left leg. Then his left hand. The cursed flesh spreads from fixed points across his body, wildly inconsistent with his stab wound. With each successful surgery another path for the infection to spread is cut off, but even then it tries to eat away at the parts he was controlling directly constantly. He has to continuously regrow the skin at all times, and append the android's exoskeleton to other parts of his body at the same time.

Gabriel's illusion has long since faded. He squirms about there, surrounded by the corpses of other Persona users. It's a long and drawn out conflict, one that slowly but steadily tips in his favor, only to quickly tilt the other way as he struggles to maintain the precise amount of regeneration to keep the grafting in place. But the worst has yet to come – his face is still falling apart, and what needs to be done there requires much more effort than an arm or leg. When the time comes to repair his lower jaw, he feels around for the bottom half of Gabriel's mouth, forcibly detaching her lower jaw, teeth and all, from the black skull. He affixes it on his own face, and leaves it at that. Growing back his lower lip and the skin from the chin to his throat was simply too difficult.

The bottom half of his face now entirely metallic, he has to cut out a section of his tongue. The infection spreads differently there, and it's easy enough to tear out the part that was infected and leave the rest the way it is, giving it a forked visage, like a snake.

The final point of contention is the wound in his chest itself. It's entirely impossible for him to close off the infection the same way as his other limbs, and it spreads outward in every direction. After a few moments of careful deliberation, he makes his final decision.

He would accept defeat, and give in to the spread of the infection on this one and only count – by cutting his chest out.

And so he does.

He rips out everything around the wound, digging out everything on the inside until his hands touch his spine. He has to tear open his ribcage, both the infected and uninfected parts, carefully avoiding his heart in the process. Even then he stops being able to breathe partway through the process. The fact that he's still blind doesn't make this any easier, but Gabriel has no eyes for him to take, and try as he might, regrowing even just one eye is enough to throw his constant state of regenerating flux off kilter.

The seconds tick by, his face turning blue as the lack of oxygen takes its toll. But shortly before he passes out, he can feel it – the last of the infected flesh has been stripped out, leaving just the infected bone and the puss surrounding it. He jams a section of Gabriel's chassis inside to cut it off from the rest of his body and puts everything that he has into growing back the rest. He stops once he can breathe again – his ribcage is deformed, and his heart has been pushed outward by the metal he stuffed inside. But he can breathe, and he can move. The spread has been stymied. It takes everything he has to keep it that way, and full reliance on android body parts, but for now, it's enough.

He starts on his knees. He can feel the rate of the spread increasing variably all across his body, and he has to readjust his regrowing everywhere to compensate. At first he struggles hard – but time is now on his side, even if it would take him hours and hours to learn how to walk again.

And so it does. Ten hours pass, and finally he manages to crawl across the destroyed platform at a steady rate. He feels around in the perpetual darkness for the corpses of the Persona users. He might not be able to regenerate his eyes entirely, but he could manage the synapses. And so he digs through the eyes of the dead.

The eyes of the fallen Persona users turn to gelatin in his hands as he pulls on them, like smashed grapes. Their insides have largely been melted away by whatever Gabriel had used to kill them. But this revelation doesn't stop him. He goes through all of them, one by one, clawing away at their eye-sockets, until at last -

A single eye, one that does not break apart at his touch. He extracts it as gently as his metallic hands can manage, and regrows the synapses from his right eye. The new eye snaps in place, and at last, he can see through his right eye once more.

All that remains of Gabriel is a handful of corpse parts that he didn't need, including the rest of her skull, and, of course, the Plume of Dusk.

He takes the plume into his hands, fitting it into the metallic fixture protruding from his chest.

"You watch from in there." His voice comes out hoarse and almost unintelligible at first with his forked tongue. "I'm going to prove it to you – that when the time comes, I will be king of this shithole. And that no matter what happens, Fumi Togo won't answer to anyone. Not to her father, not to some dyke, not even to me."

The escalator downward is just ahead. It was close by the entire time. He takes the fallen washing pole into his new hands, running the blade along his metallic palm. He's undeterred by its touch now. He stalks off to the mouth of the exit.

For Saito Nijima, everything is transitory, love and pain, and now even life and death. The authority to decide right and wrong – it lies firmly with him now. It's not a belief – it's a reality that he would cast his flesh away to see realized. Maybe there had been some truth to Dojima's firm beliefs. Maybe there was value in restoring sanity to the Grendel, as the corpses surrounding him on this level had proved. But all it did was piss him off even more.

Ultimately Gabriel had said far too much. Everyone involved in the Death of Governor Shirogane had a price to pay. Many of them had seemingly long since paid it. But he understands his role now. Why he was brought here. He's the reaper. Kitagawa, Dojima, Kirijo, Isshiki, that Arcadia woman who had yet to reveal herself, they all must be part of it – it must be the sin Dojima spoke of, and Saito was the one that had suffered the most because of it. Even with Hrothgar gone, even with his flesh trapped in a perpetual cycle of destruction and regrowth and confined to metallic limbs, and even without understanding the full extent of anyone's crimes, he was prepared to walk over them all. And that's exactly what Joker must want.

He must think that Saito was going to kill Fumi too.

He must be an idiot.