Heavy breathing. The drumming of her heart in her ears. The shakiness of breath. Kobeni could feel the breath of another person on her cheek, she could smell the aftertaste of alcohol clinging in the air.
She tries to stay away from alcohol, and despite her feeling nauseous, she knows she's not had a drop of it for months.
It's too close, far too close, stay back, stay away from me—!
What happened next, friend?
She had returned home, bloody and out of breath, to the sight of her family conversing with some police officers. She at least had the tact to toss the knife away before they noticed her.
Both the parents were ludicrous, having been convinced they had lost not one, but two daughters in the span of a single month. It made Kobeni's heart swell with regret, once they embraced her in loving arms, sputtering incomprehensibly.
The police needed a statement before they could leave. If her running away from home wasn't enough a cause, then the devils' blood that stained her clothes was more than necessary. So she fibbed a story of how she'd been swept up in a fight between some devils and vigilantes, that she had been caught in the crossfire. It was hard having to tip-toe around their suspicions on why she couldn't remember the location of the fight, but they let off eventually.
So she went to bed, thinking about how she had school tomorrow, and hadn't done any of her homework that was due. It was the first time she'd chuckled to herself before falling asleep.
What followed was a blur. Bits and pieces of memories, thousands of them, a sea of fragments, drowning in fragments because the sea was flowing forwards, surging like a tidal wave. How it towered over, then came down like a hammer, roaring with ear-splitting silence!
Come on now. Piece it all together.
Himeno never properly introduced you to me.
She didn't. The devil hunter hadn't even properly introduce herself to Kobeni when they first met. Not that she had cared at the time, having been stuck between a rock and a hard place.
It was six months after her primary school graduation. At that time, her job involved working late evenings, meaning the two-point-seven mile trek between work and home was to be done on foot. Just her luck the public transit doesn't follow a path convenient for her.
She had grown slightly accustomed to the Death Devil's machinations in this six-month span of time. It was never enough to be called a concern of wellbeing, but she could feel it at every waking moment, like nails under skin, the clamminess of the hands and the coldness in her stomach. She had grown fidgety, paranoid. It's common knowledge that devils feed from their torment on humans, so it made sense that this was how the Devil got its sick kicks—her suffering was its opium. Bawling in the corner of her bedroom every night told her this very clearly.
She knew that this palpable anxiety was going to get her into trouble someday. The devil's words held a weight befitting its title, and she had the foresight to believe it. Too many times she'd seen shadows lurking in the alleyways, had felt the dread of being watched, flesh blooming into goosebumps, hairs standing on end.
It came on the day she had received a raise for all her hard work. Personally, she didn't think her life was worth another twenty yen every month, but that was beside the point of it all.
She made do with carrying a small, inconspicuous utility knife. Its bulkier design made holding it easy, and her enhanced agility compensated for its short blade. Any monsters, human and devil alike, would be sorry to cross her and her tool of self-defense—or so she thought.
Kobeni had not figured that devils come in all shapes and sizes. The first impression she had at the cemetery was burned into her head, and she assumed that this is what makes devils so terrifying to witness—how close they could become to being human, but not ever becoming one.
She simply hadn't known that devils could take the form of other living things, things like turtle doves, or stray cats.
You are stalling, friend.
No, I am not! I swear I'm not stalling! I'm just trying to explain—!
Dread seized her heart. A wispy sensation tickled her flesh, and Kobeni looked down to find a centipede on her hand. Shocked, she stared at it as it sat there, perched there on her knuckles, seemingly staring up at her with like-minded curiosity.
It's head then swooped up, carrying it upwards, and then it slinked back down like water and pierced the skin, and oh god it's in my hand, itsinmyhand—!
She willed her arm to flail away, to detach from the rest of her body, but it wouldn't because it was an inanimate object and could not comprehend the commands it was given. The centipede burrowed its way through flesh and muscle, nerves sung a cacophony as Kobeni fell into a spazzing fit. Quickly did she lose her sense of balance as the figurative arthropod squirmed under her skin, tossing her organs and dancing between her ribs. It burrowed out from the inside of the clavicle, and with a speed and swiftness befitting its reputation, the creature buried its sharp talons into the vulnerable flesh of her neck, stinging with a hideous pain and Kobeni could not stop crying at how much it hurt.
Stop wasting time. You met Himeno sometime after your encounter with the Death Devil.
Bloodshot eyes snapped open, witnessing the moment the devil hunter's blade slashed through the blob of dead tissue fibers that composed the monster they had encountered. It had smelled of sulfur, and her eyes were watering from the pungent stench.
"Hey, you alright?"
Himeno's voice was wispy. Kobeni couldn't tell if that was her voice, or her mind supplementing what was forgotten, what she had truly sounded like.
It's because of the serum—the poison in your veins, swirling in your bittersweet blood.
"You should be careful around this time of night, devils tend to prefer the dark over the day."
A guilty nodding of the head. She was tired, closing up shop had taken longer than anticipated.
The eyepatch wasn't there, where it ought to be. A subtle glint in the devil hunter's eyes also existed—a sparkle that Kobeni found oddly alluring. It was not some form of attraction, that much was clear; but this Himeno had something compared to the one Kobeni was more familiar with—had been more familiar with, at least.
It should have been me who perished. Not her. Not Hayakawa. It should have been me.
"You did good, y'know."
Kobeni glanced up, "Huh?"
"That legwork, when you dodged this thing's attack," and Himeno poked her sword against one of the many limbs sprouting from the lumpy, foul-smelling carcass, "You moved quicker than most guys I've seen," Himeno complimented, "If you had a proper weapon on you, then you wouldn't have needed my help at all."
"I—I'm not—" instinct drove her to clam up and shy away because she could feel it coming, Kobeni could taste the apprehension.
"You wouldn't happen to have a…contract, would you?"
Indeed, Kobeni remembered the silence the most. The subtle shaking of the utility knife in her hand, the knowing look that Himeno was giving her. The smell of rotten ham and eggs.
"I…I—"
"It's alright," the devil hunter dissuaded with a wave of the hand, "I'm not gonna get on your case about it. I'd be careful if I were you, however. If the police find out about that, they might think of you as a vigilante, and that carries a painful fine."
She was right. At the time, a crisis of vigilantes was a concern for public safety, as the devil contracts these off-grid hunters possessed carried a degree of uncertainty to their encounters with devils, making collateral damage a common occurrence. Kobeni read about it online, and had been banking on the idea that if she were to get in a fight with a demon, she'd be quick about it and keep damage to a minimum.
But it wasn't like Kobeni was actively trying to hunt devils—on the contrary, they seemed keen to hunt her down and gorge themselves on her heart and innards! That circumstances had forced her into this predicament could not be her fault entirely—
Except it is.
Control gave an amused hum, somewhere near her left ear. It seems everyone was in agreement.
Go on, friend. Continue.
The memory stirred up again, and Kobeni watched herself start to shuffle away.
"One last thing, before you go," Himeno called out, and she pulled a small business card to give to the weary teenager, "If you ever find yourself in a pinch like this again, call that number, it's my cell. Once you're old enough, you could save yourself the trouble and join public safety proper, that way you get paid to fight devils."
It was spoken with a smile. Himeno was trying to be nice, to give her some hope that hiding from her own shadow was going to be worth all the pain.
All Kobeni could think of, was how much those placating words sounded like a death sentence.
Denji turned his head back a third time, and impatiently waited for the signal.
Kishibe was up to something. The Captain had told him to wait until he was done, and then he'd give the go-ahead, but now Denji was wondering what kind of trouble the old man was up to. Surely, he'd be quick about it—but it's been almost ten minutes, and boredom was creeping in his mind.
They had left the city, which had surprised him. If they wanted to gather a lot of attention and bait Makima into fighting him, it'd seem counterintuitive to do it out of the city limits, in the rolling hills of the countryside.
But the Captain was assured of something he had picked up on, whilst scrounging around some confidential documents he had swiped before the final showdown. An off-the-grid operations center, just within reach of the metropolis but not too close to draw the suspicions of suspected individuals and devils alike.
It was like one of those detective shows Denji had taken a liking to, especially when it got to the good part—where good guys bust down the door and catch the bad guys with their pants down, and all kinds of chaos ensue. To tear shit up, to eviscerate evil, this was his goal!
Something moved from his periphery. It was Kishibe, who was now perched opposite of him on the roof of the building.
"What took you so long?"
"Setting up the welcoming presents. Wouldn't want to ruin the surprise."
"You know me—I love birthday parties," Denji grinned. Already a hand of his curled around the cord to his heart.
The Captain eyed his watch and raised his other hand. Five fingers were outstretched, and Denji kept his eye on them as he held still. Seconds passed, his excitement burning in his heart. Little Pochita was barking in his head, beckoning him forward to the thrill of battle. Kishibe then dropped a finger, then a second, then a third and fourth—
Denji took a single step, and fell. His grin grew sinister as he tugged the cord, and chainsaw blades coursed through his veins, sprouting from his head and limbs. A roar erupted from his lungs—
There were at minimum twelve armed security in the lobby. The presents left by Kishibe, a couple pound-and-a-half packages of improvised explosives, detonated at the front of the entrance, blowing out the glass windows and sending shards of concrete from the supporting pillars between the windowpanes.
Recovering, the guards were too shocked from the suddenness of the blast, too focused on where the damage was caused to prepare for the grand entrance, as Chainsaw Man smashed through the glass roof and landed onto the reception's desk, his blades eviscerating the three personnel inside.
The Captain followed afterwards and struck the two guards moving from their posts at the elevators, dropping them with a torrent of blood-red needles. Another three came from the hallway opposite the elevators and were met with Kishibe's own bladed weapon. None had the chance to even raise their service pistols before they were sliced into fleshy ribbons.
From there, red rivers flowed, and bodies fell.
A/N - It has been one year and seven days since I last updated this. I keep my promises to finish my work, even despite the pain-staking process necessary to fulfill such a promise. Updates will come, but not in an ordered fashion. I will see this project through to the end; I can only hope you, as the reader who bears witness to this long-dormant journey down a timeline that never was, might do the same. - MB