-100: The Boy, the Centipede and the Recognition-

I was now more than eager to do horrible things to Jason. Except I was beaten to the punch. Kaneki—at least, that was my going assumption of who the gray-haired person was—launched himself into Jason with a shout. Now I was being pulled between helping Touka or joining Kaneki and proceeding to do like Trisha said and peel Jason like a banana. There wasn't much of a chance for me to intervene; the two were already entangled too heavily for me to make it a two-on-one, and I wasn't about to try spiking Jason with Kaneki basically on top of him. Instead, I ran to Touka.

She flinched, and tried to wriggle away when I crouched over her.

"Easy, easy. It's me."

Checking her over as best I could in the bad light and with a broken bone, Touka appeared all right. I was almost the opposite of a medic though, and nobody had seen it to teach me more than basic first aid, despite my substandard healing factor.

"I'm okay. Help Kaneki." She implored before shuddering and unexpectedly muttering. "Fingers."

Still not much I could do there; the two weren't fighting as much as they were simply beating the shit out of each other, with Kaneki holding his own surprisingly well. The pair separated for a long enough moment for me to feel safe spearing Jason's leg with a pair of spikes. Maybe not so surprising. Rage—which Kaneki seemed to be running on—was a bigger motivation than just wanting to learn.

There wasn't much I could actually do to get in involved in the fight with my arm still broken at a funny angle. Kaneki had already taken and healed from more injuries than I had taken—flaunting his rinkaku.

Also healing rapidly was Jason, though the difference was that he didn't seem to be putting much thought into how he was flailing about, or at all. Both were entirely fixed on the other, neither seeming to notice I was moving about out of reach and sinking spikes into Jason's joints on the rare occasion I could guarantee I wouldn't hit Kaneki. Thanks to the room being lit by what appeared to be a single shitty light bulb, picking up the details was not quite possible.

I could see enough to wince whenever Kaneki tanked another hit. Healing factor or not, that hurt to watch. At the same time though, there was a little bit of pride in knowing that I had helped him get to the point where he could fight like this.

Jason played to his own—literal—strength, using his tree trunk of an arm as a flail. His kagune had wrapped itself around most of his torso and head like fleshy armor. Or given how they were bring repeatedly ripped up beneath the hits from Kaneki, an ablative covering. The regeneration was starting to get on my last uninjured nerve; just how much of a reserve did we have to chew through before he went down? Even with ghoul resilience being what it was, his resilience was well above what a ghoul should be able to heal from and steadily becoming a frustration.

Oddly, Jason didn't seem to be doing anything more complicated than flailing around and behaving borderline feral. Repetitive, too, making a swing and miss as Kaneki hopped back out of range. There was none of the brutal cunning I had taken a beating from, and certainly no attempts to outflank or force off balance.

Watching Kaneki was very much an opposite, despite him clearly running on fury. I saw bits of every sparring session he and I had held and I had watched between him and Touka. A string of blows and a low kick from a rainy day when the storm drain had ran high. A feint and kick he had used on a rare day when he had tied with Touka. That retreating jab thing from a day where we had gone through five tins of coffee beans, but now augmented with his kagune. What unified it now was that Kaneki was putting it through lens of having something on the line to lose. The strike he made with the last blow was a hammer blow of a kagune strike that kicked up dust, knocked Jason backwards and ripped up tiles when it gouged into the floor.

When I took advantage of the gap to embed a spike through Jason's knee, something unexpected happened. Instead of simply ignoring the spike and healing through it like he had, Jason's knee buckled. Perhaps I had finally gotten lucky and hit something important, or even better, we had depleted his healing capacity.

Kaneki wasted no time in taking advantage of the opening, laying into Jason and pinning him down with two of his tentacles. Thinking that if nothing else, everything was no longer in quite the same state of madness now that Jason was effectively pinned. Then I heard the muttering. Bordering on inaudible, what I did catch of it was numbers. Radio frequencies? Phone numbers? Lock combinations?

Maybe things coming back to a baseline of sanity was premature.

The muttering just...continued, like static on a poorly tuned radio. Before I could ask anything or give in to the sudden instinct to run up and simply hug my surrogate little brother, Kaneki reached down and used his hands and free tendrils of his kagune to rip into Jason's kagune. Watching now gave a very graphic demonstration of how very insufficient the 'peeled like a banana' threat was. For one, bananas did not scream when peeled.

When he finished, Kaneki's arms were bloody up to the elbow. Jason's screams had receded to ragged panting. My instinct to go right up to him had been slightly dampened despite how deserving his victim had been.

"Kaneki?" Touka, apparently having none of my qualms, stepped past me toward Kaneki.

Kaneki's reaction was immediate; his head bobbed up to look at us with an expression of mild disbelief and then back around the room as if he doubted we were really there. His kagune mirrored the uncertainty, shifting to and fro like a squirrel tail as it shrunk down.

What was going through Touka's mind, I couldn't guess, but she got close enough to grab Kaneki's shoulder and repeat his name.

At that, Kaneki's murmuring stopped, his gaze snapping back up to look at Touka as if realizing she was actually there. His expression shifted from blank to horrified, stumbling over Jason as he stepped backward and ran for the door. I wasn't surprised when Touka gave chase and sprinted after him. Aiming to make the third person in the chain, I started after them only to stumble when something rolled beneath my foot.

A finger. I realized, looking down at the fleshy object. And then I saw another, and another, and…

The floor was strewn with fingers pointing nowhere. Toes, grey and curled like miniature shrimp, sat vividly on the tile. Around the buckets Touka had hit, they made little fleshy mosaics. More than a few had been stomped into smears by the fighting. If there had been anything in my stomach, it would have migrated to the floor by now.

In his own bloody puddle, Jason sucked in a shuddering breath. A ghoul's reserve of Rc cells measured their ability to heal, and with Jason's kagune torn from his body like a freshly skinned hide, Kaneki had effectively—and literally—stripped Jason's means to fight and regenerate. He definitely was a smart kid. How many fingers and toes worth of time had gone into figuring that out?

Jason would know. Jason was also not in a state where stringing together more than two words was realistic. Jason also had a lot of chunks taken out of him in the literal sense. Unusual. Then, I recognized them for what they actually were: bite marks.

No wonder the two had been fighting in such close quarters; Kaneki had been taking chunks out of Jason like a ghoul piranha. Piece after piece after piece.

No sympathy was given for the mess on the floor. As far as I was concerned, all this was his fault. Kaneki tortured, Touka beaten up, me ending up losing teeth and stuck with Aogiri overnight, two buckets worth of severed fingers and toes. And yet Kaneki had left Jason alive. The CCG reminded me that they would finish the job via the echo of a gunshot dancing through the now open doorway, but that would be…unsatisfactory. Seeing the fear in Jason's eyes when I crouched down to finish what Kaneki had started was more than a little bit enjoyable. Nobody said a quick death couldn't be painful.

Emerging from the domed building put me back onto solid ground, so to speak. At least out here I had a better idea of what was going on and what the rules of the game were. My mask, despite having being removed from my head via blunt force trauma was intact but for the straps had needing some adjustment. Lucky—I had thought it had been broken from how it was sitting on the floor.

Struggling to fix the straps with one arm almost useless, I didn't notice Nishiki until he apologized for taking so long.

"Sorry about that." He actually did sound apologetic as he flipped up his mask. "They had a bunch of their own locked up in there. Didn't think anybody deserves go out like that, even Aogiri."

I grunted approval. Anything to make the CCG's job more difficult.

"I didn't miss anything important, now, did I?"

"Kind of." We really could have used him in there, but I just didn't have the mental bandwidth to tell him.

"I saw Touka chase Kaneki back into apartments; what happened in there?"

Looking up to meet his eyes actually got him to step back. "You really want to know?"

"Maybe…tell me later." The subtext was; 'or hopefully not at all'.

"Right. We need to get moving."

We pulled our masks over our faces and jogged back into the apartments. Running didn't hurt as much as I thought it would, at least.

The apartment block nearest us was clearly still contested, as were the others in the row facing the ocean, so that was a good sign at least. The CCG was still having a slow time of taking control o the complex. I still had to find the others now, but at least we had Kaneki. Well, Touka had him since she had been on his tail according to Nishiki. At this point, our best option was just to get out; the others knew the exit plan and Touka being with Kaneki meant that he'd get out as well. In theory.

It would probably be for the best to keep an eye out for them as we went through the buildings to the opposite side of the complex; Murphy's law, after all. Going through the buildings would also be slower than just staying outside and running for it, but due to personal preference I also liked not being shot at.

The first and building was in the total chaos unique to urban warfare; fighting on multiple floors, lots of holes from where shots had overpenetrated through an extra wall, and the obligatory smell of spent powder and fresh blood. Once again, I was unsuccessfully tempted to grab a dropped CCG rifle. Why they had chosen to use full-length firearms in close quarters was still a mystery. Not that they seemed to be slowing down their users much—there were more ghoul corpses than human ones littering the place.

Nishiki seemed to be taking this well, though that might've just been the mask. At least he hadn't needed to stop to toss his cookies on a patch of floor.

We got lucky in getting to the second building: an open air causeway on one of the middle floors was intact and somehow unguarded by either side in an unusual bit of luck for me. I had expected that we would need to jump across the rooftop. The second and third buildings were only starting to be contested on the first few floors, with a stream of ghouls and CCG moving in to kill each other. Which, now that I thought of it, was strange. If Eto had known about the raid, why not leave a skeleton crew as bait and evacuate? Or use the forest to catch the CCG unaware with a surprise flank? Then again, maybe that was her plan, though she was leaving it kind of long if that was the case.

What I did know was that there was no sign of Touka and Kaneki. The two had a head start on us, so not seeing them was good, in theory. Nishiki wasn't really worried about this, though he might've just been that much more concerned with our getting out in one piece.

And then a yell wound its way up a stairwell. Familiar sounding, if a yell could sound familiar. Irimi? Touka? No idea. I wasn't familiar enough with anyone in Anteiku to tell who they were by their yelling. Probably for the better.

Ignoring Nishiki's confused protest, I skidded to a stop and backtracked to the stairwell in time to hear another familiar-ish yell echo upwards. Based on what my companion was saying, he had no idea who or what was yelling and didn't particularly appreciate my decision to investigate. Sounded like the yelp had come from one or two flights down judging by how echo-free it was.

No other sound came to guide me to any more accurate of a source than that. I groaned internally. With how big each floor was, I couldn't just check every room. Even with the CCG still stalled on the lowest floors, I couldn't afford to risk getting caught when they broke through. Fortunately, I caught something of a break on the first floor I checked: laughter. That was a clue. Like Trisha said back home, nobody sane laughed during raid—Monica was, possibly, an exception. From there, the all I had to do was follow the commotion.

What I found was another barracks-style room, a fair amount of very fresh corpses and a few survivors on the far side of the room. This at least I could reconstruct. CCG enters room, kills ghouls on far side of room, gets jumped from behind by Aogiri. The current survivor count seemed to be four Aogiri and at least one CCG. Still unexplained: why I had been lured down here in the first place.

The ghouls all had their attention on the CCG, taunting with what they'd do after they were dead. Typical overconfident bravado. The whole place collapsing around their ears and they were just wasting time. Not that the CCG hadn't shown that it was apparently amateur hour, letting themselves get caught like this. I was ready to bet they had even ran out of ammo.

"Not ready just yet?" Once voice came. "That's fine. Our leaders are going to hit the CCG from behind any minute now. Then we'll have all the time to take you apart, bit by bit."

"Fuck off!" That was the familiar voice, female, but I couldn't identify who it was.

"Ah-ha-ha. We'll have time for that as well, don't you worry."

"Whoo!" Another ghoul hopped to the side. "Easy there lady, you could hurt somebody swinging that around."

In the gap that opened up, I saw part of a quinque—not much, but more than enough to identify. It had had been in my hands long enough that I knew it on sight.


Well, here we are; chapter one hundred. I've had a lot of enjoyment writing this and I hope all of you enjoy it as well. If you've got any special questions about story points, bit of symbolism I've used, or anything else, ask away; I should be doing something special for milestone.

A note on the timeline here, since it may be a bit indistinct: Allen's pushing of Anteiku to not delay rescuing Kaneki meant that he reached Jason's playroom approximately three and a half days after Kaneki was caught. His ill-advised call to Amon also resulted in the CCG moving up their schedule of the Aogiri raid, due to Amon reporting it, and the CCG triangulating his cell signal.