Hey guys and welcome, to the sixth lovely chapter of Tokyo Ghoul: Remnant. As you can see, I'm back with a chapter that's over ten thousand words, somewhere around eleven or twelve thousand words to be more specific.
Now, some of you might be confused as to why I'm pointing this out when I have chapters that are full six-five thousand words longer than this one. If you add in the fact that I've been pretty consistent with these chapter lengths then now you're doubly confused.
Well, I'm only pointing it out because the length of the chapter isn't what's important, it's the amount of time I took to write it.
A week over one month, that's how long it took to write this chapter. That's a full three weeks ahead of my normal schedule! Something that rarely happens to a prone procrastinator like myself.
Well, that's enough about the production of the chapter, let's now talk about the actual chapter itself.
To put it bluntly, this chapter is going to answer many of your questions. In a way that will surprise a good portion of you and will also manage to leave you with even more questions, but don't worry I already have my ways to answer those questions planned out, so none of you need to worry about it just being an ass pull twist that I wrote just to surprise you all.
I have everything under control, I so swear.
I could also use new cover art for this story, so if any of you can make me one it's greatly appreciated and I'll be sure to give you the credit you deserve.
Oh wait, what's that you're saying? I should stop being a lazy ass and learn how to draw myself? Fine then (but no seriously, if you there's anyone who could make me one, it would be greatly appreciated).
So, that's all I really have to say, but before I start the chapter up. I want to thank you all for getting this story so close to five-hundred favorites.
Hopefully, the story can hit the half a millennium mark with this chapter, because ever since I was a baby writer on this site, I've always wanted to be the writer of one of those top-tier fanfics that reached over a thousand favorites and to even have half that would make my heart jump with joy.
Well, that statement probably got misconstrued and somehow managed to get me labeled as someone who only cares about numbers and not the love of writing, so I'm going to play the mandatory disclaimer and run before the flames appear.
-Mandatory Disclaimer-
I seriously don't own either of these series, so stop asking. Seriously. Stop.
-Chapter 6: Grander Scheme of Things-
Stealth had always been Blake's favorite method of dealing with an enemy. There was just something about sneaking around in the shadows while slowly picking off enemy after enemy without them ever knowing that felt so satisfying to her.
It also helped that dealing with the intellectual and physical challenges that came with a stealth-oriented approach had always come naturally to her due to her penchant for reading, which did have a lot of more things in common with one another than most people thought.
For example, before someone started reading a new book, they would first scan the book over once or twice so they could get a decent understanding of what it was about. The same thing applied to approaching a stealth situation, where the person approaching said situation would first have to scope out the area before they went in so they could get an understanding of what they were walking into.
She could probably list a thousand more similarities between the two, but she unfortunately didn't have the time to waste on doing so. There was an objective she needed to complete and she knew she was going to need all of her mental faculties to complete it.
Her objective was to find her teammates and the people from the settlement, who had all been taken hostage by that woman with three different shades of hair color and her men, and free them. It sounded like a simple task, but that was probably because it was attached to a relatively simple plan, which was really nothing more than a set of objectives that she knew had to be completed with a few vague steps on how to help them get there.
She would first have to take the time to capture one of the enemy men and interrogate him until he gave her their location, a task that sounded more difficult than it actually was considering the fact that these henchmen were criminals, and criminals tended to not want to risk their lives for someone other than themselves.
Then, she would have to deal with the henchmen who were undoubtedly guarding them and do so without alerting anybody of her presence. Something that she was more than confident she could do, but not without some obvious difficulty, which she hoped would be lessened later by Kaneki's coming diversion.
And after she dealt with all of the henchmen in the area came the easy part, she would proceed to free all the hostages and she would then move to assist Kaneki with her newly-freed teammates in tow to help him deal with whatever enemy he was facing with at the time.
Like she had said earlier, her plan wasn't much of a plan at all, which was something she attributed to the fact that she wasn't the best at coming up with strategies before going into situations and was even worse at sticking with them when things started going awry.
She was much more adept at improvising and reacting to things as they happened, which she believed to be a direct result of her affinity for doing things the stealthy way.
She felt this because stealth, to its very core principles, only required a set of objectives to complete and a set of specifications as to how they were completed. Rarely did the path taken to complete them matter because a lot of freedom to adapt was needed for situations that required stealth, something that simply wasn't possible with a large-scale plan.
So for her, someone who has spent her entire life relying on stealth to get things done, to come up with an intricate and well-thought out plan wasn't something she was confident she could do very easily.
That's why she came up with such a simple plan. If things were to hit the proverbial fan then she would have the freedom to improvise and change it without jeopardizing the entire operation.
'Alright, first things first, find someone to tell me the whereabouts of the hostages,' she thought to herself as she began moving towards the side-entrance to the settlement she had found a few minutes after she had separated from Kaneki.
Unsurprisingly, the entrance was being guarded by a pair of men dressed in full-black suits that were adorned with bright red ties, who were both holding what looked to be the standard-issue, dust bullet shooting assault rifle.
Ones that she assumed to be of more a cheaply made variety given the fact that military-grade weaponry were much more expensive to get from black market dealers and thus a much less attractive of weapon for a crime boss to arm his men with since their budget would never be on the same scale of an entire government funded by taxpayer money.
'Alright, I guess rushing them is out of the question,' she noted, knowing that rushing them might lead to one of them shooting their guns in retaliation, which both would alert the enemy of her presence and completely nullify all of Kaneki's efforts as a distraction.
'Hm, maybe I could-' she began to muse before a volley of gunfire split through the silent forest air and forced her attention away from her thoughts and towards the direction she had heard the gunfire come from.
'Wait, isn't Kaneki over there?' she asked herself mentally as a tinge of worry ran through her veins.
"W-what the hell was that?" she heard one of the guards yelp out in a mix of shock and fear, prompting her to return her attention back onto the two guards, who were now looking over in the same direction she was a few seconds ago, leaving their backs completely open to attack.
'This might be my chance,' the bow-wearing teen noted as she reached up and removed Gambol Shroud from its magnetic holster while both mentally and physically preparing herself to charge at the two.
"Gunfire, I think," replied the other guard, who had reacted much calmer manner than his partner, "Might be an attack, or-"
The guard never got to finish whatever he was going to say because the moment he had started talking, Blake had shot out of the brush, ran up to him and smacked him right on the backside of the head with the back of Gambol Shroud's metal sheath, knocking all consciousness out of the guard immediately.
Probably having taken notice of his partner's sudden cut off, the other guard turned around to see what had happened only to find her pointing the tip of the completely unsheathed form of Gambol Shroud right where his jugular would be.
"Wh-" the henchman began before she cut him off.
"Stop talking, right now," she commanded him in the coldest tone she could muster, "You're not going to talk and you're definitely not going to move, unless I tell you otherwise or this blade is going to reach the otherside of your throat, do you understand?"
The guard visibly gulped and nodded his head tentatively.
"Okay, now I'm going to ask you a couple of questions and then I'm going to knock you out," she continued, using the same tone as she did earlier, "Which means, if I find out that you lied about any of the answers you gave me, I'm going to come back here and make sure this blade goes where I said it would, do you understand that?"
The guard nodded once more.
"Alright, do you remember those three girls you captured, the ones that came in the Bullhead you shot at?"
The guard gave another nod in response.
"Did you put them with the other hostages?"
Yet another nod.
"Now, where are those hostages?" she followed, asking him the million lien question.
A question that he frantically replied to with, "They're in a large building somewhere in the middle of the settlement, you'll know it when you see it."
"As of right now, how many of you are guarding it?" she pressed the man further, wanting to know every scrap of detail she could.
"I don't know, um, somewhere around ten and twenty," he answered with a tone that made it clear that he wasn't sure what he was saying was actually true or not and was giving her his best ballpark guess, "I didn't really bother with learning the number since I wasn't stationed to guard it, y'know."
The bow-wearing teen stared at the man in front of her with scrutinizing amber eyes, looking for any sign that might indicate that he was lying or withholding information from her, but found nothing that would point to that.
"I'm going to assume that's all you know about the situation, would I be correct in assuming that?" she asked him and he gave a frantic nod back almost immediately, "Alright, then that means that I have you no more use for me unfortunately."
Without saying another word, she bashed the henchman in the side of the head with bottom of Gambol Shroud's pommel with all of the strength she could muster, knowing that it would take a lot more power to knock a full-grown man out without any previous momentum built up.
She was initially quite concerned that she had put too much force into that blow when the man fell over onto his side, limp as a wet rag, but any concerns were immediately dashed when she saw that his chest was still rising and falling like it should've been.
'To the center of the settlement then…' she thought to herself as she made her way through the entrance the two now unconscious thugs were guarding.
'Wait, what did she just call me?' Kaneki asked himself as he stared at the multi-color haired woman with dull grey eyes that contained a mix of shock and confusion before he began to mentally repeat what she had just said in his head, 'Haise… Haise… Haise… That name… Why does it sound so familiar?'
She, however, didn't look familiar to him at all and he fully doubted that he would forget someone as unique-looking as her.
The thing about her that first caught his eye the moment he first laid eyes upon her was her hair, or to be more specific her hair color. She had hair that was sectioned off into three different colors: one part light pink, another part chocolate brown, and a few streaks of pale white in the pink area, which was a color combination he didn't see so often when it came to hair.
The next thing that he noticed were her differently-colored eyes, which bared the same shade as the two main colors of her hair, pink and brown, and stared down at him with a look that was part condescension and another part being an emotion he couldn't quite pin down.
'Stop it!' he berated himself mentally while he shook his head to free himself from such thoughts, 'She's just trying to distract you, no matter how familiar that name may sound, what she's saying is not true so don't fucking fall for it.'
"I mean, look at you with that serious expression on your face, can't say it really fits you," the woman began in a voice that was filled with amusement, shaking him out of his thoughts almost immediately, "Same goes for the white hair and eyepatch, by the way."
"Makes you look ridiculous, if I dare say so myself," she added with a look of honest contemplation on her face, "Almost like a wannabe, emo pirate."
"I'm sorry," the white-haired half ghoul stated as he pushed himself back up to his feet, noticing a dull pain beginning to radiate from his midsection as he did so, but he shrugged it off as residual damage from the hit he had taken earlier, "But I think you might be confusing me with someone else, my name's not Haise, it never was and it never will be."
"Really now?" the woman asked as that self-assured smile of hers was momentarily replaced with what looked like a troubled frown before immediately reverting back to what it previously was and continuing to speak.
"Well, I would like to say that I'm not very inclined to believe you," she continued on before she stopped and pointed her weapon at him, which essentially looked exactly like a pink and white umbrella, "But for now, I think it'd be best if we save that discussion for after I beat you into submission, don'tcha think?"
He let out an irritated snort at the woman's words and raised his own weapon in anticipation for the woman's impending attack, making sure that his eyes never left her as he did so, but lost sight of her when she disappeared in a flash.
That wasn't to say that she had moved from one place to another so quickly that his eyes couldn't keep up with it. No, what had happened was that there was a literal flash of bright, white light and the woman was nowhere to be seen the moment it dissipated.
'What the-?' he began but immediately cut that train of thought off when his instincts flared up and told him that there was now a presence standing behind him that wasn't there the second before.
Not wanting a repeat of what had happened to him less than a minute ago, Kaneki jumped forwards and felt something graze the back of his blazer as he did so.
Knowing that there was a good chance the woman was going to try to attack him once he landed, he turned a full one-hundred eighty degrees in midair and prepared himself to dodge more of her attacks. She did as he predicted and had tried to attack him, this time opting to charge directly at him instead of doing whatever she did with that flash of light.
The multi-color haired woman swung her umbrella at him the moment she got close enough to do so and in response to the attack, the artificial ghoul read the trajectory of the swing and found that the umbrella would eventually meet with his head if it he didn't move, so he did the most logical thing he could think of at the moment and moved.
Ducking out of the way of the swing, he took a step forward and slashed at the woman's newly exposed stomach in retaliation. His attack, much like her own, ended up missing its intended mark because she had jumped back and out of the reach of his blade before it could meet with her flesh.
Not wanting to give her even a second to breathe, he switched his mindset from defensive to offensive and closed the distance in between the two of them with the intent of pressing her into making a mistake.
Gripping the handle of his blade with both hands so he could put more power behind his attack, he sent a downward swing her way, to which she responded by easily side-stepping it and jumping back out of the way once again.
He followed her to where she landed and took another swing at her, this one being of the horizontal and rightward variety, which prompted her to jump backwards yet again to evade the attack.
The cycle of him attacking and her jumping back to evade those attacks repeated two more times before it was finally broken when instead of slashing at her, he spun counterclockwise while raising his right leg to feign a kick.
Naturally not knowing the kick was a feign, the woman raised her umbrella in response, probably intending to attempt to parry the attack instead of simply trying to evade it like she had done the past four times in a row. Something that, if it was successfully done, would reverse their current roles and put her back onto the offensive.
Unfortunately for her, this was exactly how he wanted her to react, which was something she probably realized when the initial kick she was preparing to parry never came. What did come, however, was a spinning heel kick delivered at half the range of his first and came with the same amount momentum of the original.
The kick still made contact with the umbrella, but the amount of force put into it, coupled with the fact that the woman probably wasn't fully expecting the kind of kick he was throwing, allowed him to knock the weapon out of her hand and off towards his left.
When his foot returned to its place back onto the ground, he immediately tried a slash directed at the woman's abdomen, knowing that jumping back and away from the attack would prove to be ineffective at their current range.
It seemed that she was aware of this fact too because right before his blade reached the unclothed flesh at her midriff, she flipped herself up and over it. He had expected her to stop flipping when she landed back onto her feet, but she went against those expectations and continued to cartwheel towards where her weapon was laying on the ground.
The artificial ghoul cursed to himself upon seeing this and shot towards her, hoping that he would be fast enough to intercept her and get a hit in before she reached the umbrella. He gripped his weapon's handle with both hands as he charged towards, mentally preparing himself for a clash when he noticed that she stopped cartwheeling for some reason or the other.
Hoping that it wasn't because she had managed to reach her weapon, he slashed down at her when he got close enough to do so, but unfortunately she was able to get to her weapon before he attacked and managed to blocked the incoming strike with one of her own, causing the sharp edge of his blade to clash with the round wood of the umbrella.
"You've improved a lot from the last time we did something like this, haven't you?" the woman he was currently deadlocked with mused, "It seems not just in terms of skill, but in strength as well if you're actually able to keep even with me like this."
From an outsider's perspective, one might see how they were pushing his weapon against hers and think that they were evenly matched in terms of strength, but that wasn't the case at all. Kaneki was actually only putting in enough force to keep them even in the deadlock they were having, knowing that it would be unwise to try and overpower someone with the amount of skill she had.
No, the best way to beat someone who was more skilled than you was to employ the element of surprise in how you fought, which basically meant that he had to do things she might not have expected him to be able to do.
A flashback to his sparring session with Weiss earlier the previous day forced its way to the forefront of his mind and reminded him that he had been taught how to deal with situations like the one he was currently in.
The heiress of the Schnee fortune had taught him that when he was deadlocked with someone, he should try and do something called a flat-faced parry so that's what he did.
While releasing some of the force he was pushing against her with so that she would be the one who was predominantly pushing up against him, he shifted his blade so that her umbrella was no longer being pressed against the edge of his sword, but pressed against the flat part of the blade instead.
Then doing so in one fluid motion, he began to spin counterclockwise while angling his blade so that her umbrella, which was now sliding down the flat of his blade to its tip, would go over his right shoulder and miss touching his head by a few centimeters as he moved.
Not being able to pull back fast enough, the woman's umbrella did exactly as he intended it to and rolled off his blade, fully exposing its wielder to attack. He followed through on his spin and attempted a swing at the woman's throat that greatly resembled that of a baseball player trying to hit a baseball.
The white-haired half ghoul watched as his blade traveled towards the woman's neck with a wry smile only to start frowning when he saw her lean back suddenly and miss being hit by a hair's breadth in what seemed like slow motion.
The world then suddenly shifted from slow motion back to real time when he felt something awfully familiar being forcibly driven into the back of his knee with enough force to cause it to buckle under him.
Before he could even react to that blow being dealt to him, he felt the same thing meet with the back of his head, which caused his face to go on a sudden one way trip towards the ground. The only reason why it didn't lead to him ending up with a mouthful of dirt was that he had stuck his hands out in front of him so that he could catch himself before it could happen.
Truth be told, the hits he was taking really didn't hurt very much, but the last shot he took had disoriented him to the point where he couldn't even look at the ground without it splitting up into twos that repeatedly switched places, back and forth, with one another.
Kaneki let out an annoyed grunt before he clamped his eyes shut and began to shaking his head violently in hopes of correcting his vision, but before he could open his eyes to see if it had actually helped or not, he felt something cold and smooth suddenly press up against the area directly above his Adam's apple.
At first, the object was only applying a small amount of pressure against his throat, which still allowed him a small amount of room to breathe. Then not even a second later, he felt the amount of pressure on his trachea increased tenfold, forcibly cutting off his ability to breathe and send blood up to his brain as he felt himself be forcibly dragged up into a kneeling position.
"My, you really have changed, haven't you Haise?" he heard the woman say from somewhere behind him before he felt a new force suddenly start pressing down on the back of his head, pushing his throat further into whatever was pressing up on it.
If that wasn't enough pain for him to go through, the sound of her saying that name again had caused the dull pain in his abdomen to increase, not enough for it to actually start hurting him, but the difference in intensity was definitely hard not to notice.
'What the fuck is that?' he cursed to himself before the sound of the woman speaking drew him out of his thoughts.
"You know, there are a few things that I never thought I would be able to see in my lifetime," she began in a voice that sounded very strange, it sound almost as if she was reminiscing about something from her past, "But I never thought I see the day where I would see Haise Sasaki of all people try to cleave my head off from in between my shoulders."
Those words had caused the pain in his abdomen to increase once more, which made him wonder if he had somehow been stabbed at some point during the fight. He would've reached down to check, but his hands were too preoccupied with grasping at whatever was cutting off more and more of his air supply, which in turn caused him to lose more and more of his consciousness as the seconds ticked by.
"Tell me, do you really hate me that much?" the multi-color haired woman asked in a tone that was void of her earlier mocking tone and was replaced with one that sounded like bitter amusement, "I mean, did what I do to you really make you hate me enough that it made you able kill me without a single ounce of hesitation?"
The already intensifying pain in his midsection seemingly doubled when she said that and his vision got blurrier as he felt himself getting closer to fading.
"But you know what..." she trailed off right when he felt a cold hand begin to run itself down the left side of his head, starting from the top of his head and slowly making its way down to where his left eye should've been, but was currently being covered up by his medical eyepatch.
"Other than the new look you got for yourself," she began as she slipped a couple of her thin, bony fingers underneath said eyepatch and touched the eye underneath softly, "I kind of like the new 'ready-to-kill' Haise, definitely makes you a lot more interesting than the one who would feel bad about accidentally stepping on an ant."
That was the proverbial final straw for Kaneki. That last sentence out of her had caused the pain he was feeling to become unbearable to the point where he completely forgot about the fact that his vision, much like his own consciousness, had almost faded completely.
'Need to get away,' he commanded himself mentally as his grip on whatever was wrapped around his neck tightened before pulling down on it with all of his might, which allowed himself an opportunity to refill his lungs with much needed oxygen.
His vision became increasingly less and less blurry as oxygen poured back into his lungs, which allowed to him notice that the object that had been wrapped around his neck extended out over his left shoulder.
He quickly pieced one and two together and realized that the woman had been using her umbrella to choke him out, which prompted him to grab higher up on the weapon with his left hand and throw it like it was a javelin, sending it and its owner flying through the air in front of him.
The white-haired ghoul wasn't able to see where the woman ended up landing because the momentum the throw had created had forced him back onto his hands and knees, which was something he probably would've been more concerned about if the entirety of his body wasn't so oxygen starved.
'Dammit, she's strong,' he mentally cursed once again as he breathing began to slow back to its usual pace, 'Actually, she's probably the strongest opponent I've had to face since my fight with Arima.'
He wasn't exaggerating at all when he said that. Thinking back on it, the only real challenge he's had in terms of an opponent to face ever since then was Weiss, but that was just sparring session so he couldn't even call that a real fight to begin with.
'I'm not going to be able to beat her this way,' he noted while glancing down at his sword, which he was forced to drop when the woman had started choking him out, 'She's clearly far too experienced with her weapon for me to try and fight her and equal terms with my own.'
If someone were to ask him how he was able to discern something like that from only a single clash, he would answer by pointing out how she had used her weapon throughout said clash, which was barely at all except for the few times when he would accidently give her an opening to exploit.
For example, when he went on the offensive and tried to attack her, he noticed that she had never once raised her weapon to defend herself throughout the entire exchange and had opted to dodge his attacks instead.
Something that initially made no sense to him since it was a widely known fact that blocking an attack was much easier than trying to dodge one, but it soon became apparent to him after his fourth attempt at hitting her that she wasn't blocking his attacks because she could read his attacks like they were words on a page and didn't feel there was a need to.
He didn't know if this was because of his lack of experience handling his own weapon, her experience handling hers, or a combination of both; however, he did know that he was never going to beat her in his current state.
Luckily, he did have a way of swinging the advantage his way in the form of his kagune, but he did have to admit that he was rather reluctant to use it for two reasons.
The first being the fact that there was always the chance that she might get away before he got the opportunity to kill her and he'd rather not have an enemy who had the manpower to take an entire settlement of people hostage know about the biggest secret he had.
The second reason was, admittedly, a much more personal one. To him, having to resort to such drastic measures felt exactly like he was admitting to the fact that he couldn't beat her by normal means alone, which was something he didn't like to do too often, even if he knew that not doing so would put himself at a disadvantage.
Of course, there were times where he had no other choice but to stoop to such levels to win like his later fights with Shachi and Amon, and he would gladly throw away his pride if it that was the case, but if the situation at hand didn't specifically call for such actions to be taken, he'd more than likely end up not taking them to satisfy said emotion.
'Come on, come on think!' he yelled at himself mentally as he wracked his brain for a way of beating her without bringing out his kagune, 'I can beat her without using my kagune, I just have to-'
"You're wrong, Ken," he heard a voice say from somewhere behind him in a deep and scratchy voice, a voice that eerily sounded a lot like his own, "You and I both know that you're never going to be able to beat her at this level of strength."
"At this rate, she's going to kill you and those precious new friends of yours," the voice continued on in a mocking tone, "Even now, you still can't protect a thing, can you?"
'That's not true,' he argued vainly against the voice in his head, 'She said that she needed us alive.'
"And what do you think she's going to do once she's done using you all?" it proceeded to ask, completely derailing any argument he had against it, "She's definitely not just going to let you all go, that's for sure."
The white-haired half ghoul felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand straight up when a hand that was almost deathly cold clasp tightly around his right shoulder, one bony finger at a time.
"You're so cold Ken, does the thought of losing your new friends scare you that much?" it whispered so closely into his right ear that he could feel the lack of warmth in its breath, "Then why don't you just throw away that pride of yours and just accept me already?"
"Could you please just shut up?" he growled at the voice in his head through clenched teeth as he forced himself back onto his feet, the still nagging pain in his abdomen long since forgotten under the shroud of emotion that had draped itself over him.
"Oh, did I strike a nerve there?" the woman asked, her mocking voice replacing the one that had been speaking to him in his head.
He opened his mouth to answer the question, but the words died in his throat when he saw her raise her left hand up to shoulder level and spin a familiar white object around the middle of her pointer finger.
'Is that…?' he began to ask as his own left hand subconsciously shot up to where his eyepatch should've been to confirm what he thought had happened, only to curse to himself internally when he realized that his suspicions proved themselves to be true, 'Dammit, she must've pulled it off when I threw her…'
He let out an irritated snort before returning his hand back to its original position at his side and mentally adding, '... but then again, it's not like I'm going to need for what happens next.'
"So that's what you were hiding under this thing," the woman noted before throwing the broken eyepatch off to the side somewhere like it was a piece of trash, "Hm, I was expecting it to be closed with a scar over it or something, but I guess a perfectly normal eye is fine too."
The white-haired half ghoul let out an amused scoff as he began to slip his school blazer off of his shoulders, tilting his head down at an angle so that his eyes were hidden behind his white bangs.
"A 'perfectly normal eye', huh?" he repeated, a small smile creeping onto his face as he extended his right arm out to his side and dropped the bloodstained article of clothing onto the ground in the same fashion the woman had discarded his eyepatch, before proceeding to ask in a mocking tone that could've rivaled her own, "You sure like making a lot of assumptions, don't you?"
He noticed the woman raise an eyebrow at the statement and open her mouth, probably in an attempt to respond to the statement, but he cut her off before any words could escape her mouth.
"The only things you've done up until now was assume all of these things about me," Kaneki explained as he rotated his right hand so that his open palm faced the ground, "My eye being perfectly normal... You and I knowing each other… What my name is… You just assumed that all of these things were true."
"So let's set things straight before you assume any more incorrect things about me," he continued while placing his right thumb over his index finger, "I don't know who you think I am, but whoever he is, I'm not him."
"Really now?" she asked him in a tone that screamed that she didn't entirely buy what he was saying, but was playing along anyway, "Well, truth be told, I sort of prefer this over the alternative. I mean, in terms of who I'm more interested in, I think you beat Haise by a longshot."
The rinkaku-type ghoul let out a sardonic chuckle in response to the statement as he began to push his kagune up to the surface, which caused a bubbling black mass to begin to form on the small of his back.
"I wonder if I should be happy about that or not," he replied, a bone-chillingly loud crack ringing through the air as he pressed down onto his index finger.
At the exact same moment he cracked his finger, the mass forming on his back exploded outwards and prompted a thick, sludge-like liquid to spew out from it.
"But I think that it'd be better for the both of us if you and I not get involved at all..." he continued as the liquid that had been spewing wildly from his back began to form eight jet black tentacles.
Looking up at the woman, who was now staring at him with a look of pure shock, the small smile he had been sporting earlier evolved into one of gleeful madness as the kakugan in his left eye activated. The sclera of his once 'perfectly normal' left eye turning jet black and his iris turning a brilliantly bright crimson.
"... right?"
Before his opponent could even open her mouth to respond to what he had just said, he pounced up in the air towards her and sent the four tentacles that had formed on the right of his body towards her. Probably acting off instinct alone, the woman flipped herself back and out of the way his kagune, causing the four kagune to stab into the concrete ground where she once stood instead of her body like he had intended.
Knowing that he should press the advantage for as long as he had it, when Kaneki landed back onto the ground, he retracted the kagune he had impaled into the ground, he pivoted his hips to the right and sent the four that had formed on the left side of his body towards his still-cartwheeling opponent.
Almost as if she was expecting him to do something like that, she ceased all cartwheeling and pointed the tip of her umbrella right at the four tentacles shooting towards her. He briefly wondered what she was trying to do when her umbrella suddenly opened up, revealing the pink and white canopy that it had kept hidden throughout the entirety of their earlier clash.
His kagune slammed into her umbrella, but instead of running clean through the seemingly thin fabric canopy of said umbrella, the predatory organs failed to penetrate the unassumingly effective shield and simply pushed the woman a couple of feet back from her original position.
'Looks like I'm not going to be able to stab through that umbrella of hers,' the white-haired half ghoul thought to himself calmly as began to combine the four unoccupied kagune on his right side into a single, much larger tentacle, 'I guess I'm going to have to smash through it instead.'
Retracting the four kagune that were pressing against the umbrella's canopy, he simultaneously brought the single, heftier kagune down onto his still defending opponent with all of the force he could muster.
The offending scaled tentacle slammed into the ground with enough force to crush the concrete into dust, which flew up in the air from the shock of the impact.
'Shit...' he cursed to himself, knowing that meant his attack had hit the ground, and only the ground.
'There's no way she could've moved out of the way that fast,' he added mentally as he began to scan his surroundings frantically for the woman's whereabouts, 'She must've did what she did earlier when she disappeared in that flash of light.'
'So where…' he trailed off mentally when he noticed a bright flash similar to the one he had seen earlier occur from directly above him, prompting him to look up towards it.
There he found the woman falling down towards him with her umbrella raised over her head, ready to be brought down onto him.
Acting almost off instinct alone, the artificial ghoul began to retract the giant kagune from the crater it rested in and back to him, dragging it along the ground as he split it back into four separate tentacles.
When they were almost back to him, he jumped up in the air, pivoting his body so that he was parallel to the ground and spun counterclockwise in mid-air so he could counter the incoming attack with the four returning kagune.
Just like last time he attempted to hit her, there was a bright flash of light and his kagune had once again hit nothing but empty air.
He landed back onto his feet and he mentally growled to himself, 'Oh come on, you have got to be-'
Kaneki felt something, probably the umbrella the woman was holding, slam into the back of his head before he could finish the mental statement and he stumbled forwards in response to the blow.
Already knowing that she wasn't going to be behind him when he turned around, he swept his kagune a full three-hundred sixty degrees around him in hopes of stopping the multi-color haired woman's assault before it began.
Once he had finished the defensive sweep, he scanned his surroundings for a sign of the woman and found her sitting on top of an old fashion-looking street lamp with one of her legs crossed over the other. She was looking down at him with a self-satisfied smirk spread across her lips and when she saw him look up at her, she began to clap her hands together slowly.
"You know, if that was your attempt to try and get me disinterested in you then I have to say that you're doing a pretty shoddy job of it," the woman stated in the same mocking tone as before, making it seem like the reveal of his kagune didn't affect her at all, "Because, trust me when I say that, I've never been more interested in a person than I am with you, right now."
'Hm, despite how evenly she's speaking, her diaphragm is expanding and contracting more rapidly than normal,' the white-haired half ghoul noted as he scanned the woman up and down with his eyes, 'That must mean that teleporting ability of hers takes a bit more out of her than she lets on, which means I should probably expect one of two things from her from here on out.'
'She's either going to use it over and over in an attempt to dispatch me quickly, or she's going to use it sparingly and try to whittle me down until I'm the one who's out of energy,' he mused as a plan of attack began to form in his head, 'With my stamina, withstanding either form of attack wouldn't be too difficult, but the prior is obviously more favorable than the latter in this situation.'
'Which means I'm going to have to-' he began mentally but was cut off when he saw the woman once again disappear in a bright flash of light as she teleported away from her perch, but unlike last time he knew where she teleported to almost immediately.
Mainly because she teleported herself so that was standing right in front of him and before he could react to her sudden change in positioning, Kaneki felt something with a sharp point jam itself into the area of his stomach.
Being a ghoul with an abnormally high pain tolerance, whatever had been jammed into his stomach didn't manage to pierce his skin and he didn't even feel any pain from the attack, but despite all of this, his body still began to recoil from the force of the impact.
As he doubled over, he noticed that the blow had indeed caused him to feel pain, but he realized that there was something off about the pain the moment it him. He knew what it should feel like to be hit in the stomach and it wasn't the same.
The pain wasn't sharp and it wasn't coursing through his body like it had somehow replaced the blood in his veins. No, the pain he was currently feeling was dull and it hovered in one single area.
'I've felt this before…' he noted mentally as the already intense pain in his abdomen seemingly doubled, which forced him to his knees as his legs to give way under him suddenly, '... this kind of pain, I've felt it before, I know I have.'
He knew this sort of pain well, way too well in his opinion.
'Why am I-' he began but was cut off when a memory that he knew to be completely and undoubtedly foreign to him suddenly invaded his thoughts.
No longer was Kaneki kneeling on the cold concrete. Hell, he wasn't even on his knees anymore.
He was standing in what he recognized to be the interior of a BullHead airship's cargo hold, looking down through the bullhead's open side door at the ground that was several stories below him as it zipped by.
"Sorry about this," he heard an all too familiar voice say from behind him right before he felt a sharp pain suddenly run through his midsection with the speed of a wildfire.
His eyes immediately shot down towards where the pain was coming from to see what had caused it and found a thin blade poking out from where his navel should be. He watched it with wide, shocked eyes as it retreated back into his body and felt it come out of the initial point of entry.
Warm blood began to leak profusely out of the newly-made wounds in his stomach and his back as the force of the blade being pulled out of him caused him to stumble forward, which caused him to come dangerously close to falling out of the BullHead's cargo hold.
He looked over his shoulder in hopes of catching even a small glimpse of the person who had stabbed him, but what he actually saw immediately made him regret that action.
There, standing behind him with a blade that was covered from tip to guard with what he presumed to be his blood, was the same tri-color haired woman. She didn't have the same mocking smile she had earlier, but the corner of her lips were turned upwards in a smile, one that seemed strangely sad to him.
"Why…" the words slipped from his lips right before all strength left his legs and he began falling out through the BullHead's side door.
He reached a hand towards the multi-color haired woman as he fell and he uttered a name that should've been foreign to him, but it instead caused him to feel a pain that was much worse than any injury could cause.
"... Neo?" the name slipped from the white-haired ghoul's lips as the memory playing out in his head finally subsided.
'That name... where did I…' he began mentally as the dull pain hovering in his stomach area doubled once more.
"Oh, so you do remember my name?" the woman in question noted in a distinctly curious tone, "I guess it just took a stab where I stabbed you last to get your memory running."
Those words had barely registered with him as his mind was almost completely focused on the agony that was radiating from his stomach. His bony fingers clutched at the aching flesh as his body began to tremble.
'It hurts… it hurts… it hurts…' the phrase repeated itself over and over in his head as the eight scaled tentacles on his back began to thrash around wildly in his pain-driven panic, getting so wrapped up in his mental breakdown that he didn't even notice that the woman had once again disappeared in a flash of light, 'It hurts… IT HURTS… IT HURTS!'
Blake's progress towards the center of the settlement could be described with one word: gradual. This was because instead of flat out running towards her destination and bursting into where her teammates were being held with reckless abandon, she was taking a much more stealth-oriented approach and surveying the area around her before moving from one hiding spot to another.
It took her thrice amount the time it took if she had just went with the prior option, but she knew that doing so would put her at such a disadvantage that it would probably be more practical for her to walk up to the enemy and surrender, because at least that option didn't end her with being horrendously maimed or killed.
A decision that was only affirmed in her mind when she saw the amount of men that were guarding the building she assumed to hold the hostages, which she recognized to be structure that had been singled out as the settlement's town hall during the briefing her team had been given before they had departed.
It was about two stories tall and seemed to be made out of a combination of grey stone brick walls and white marble pillars, which made it stand out from the other buildings in the settlement that were made out of only grey brick.
'Either they have a lot more men that I initially thought or Kaneki's distraction didn't work,' she took note of the amount of guards patrolling the area as her amber eyes scanned the streets surrounding the town hall from a nearby alleyway, looking for any telltale signs of a possible point of entry, 'Well, this certainly complicates things.'
She didn't necessarily need her ghoul's teammate's diversion to successfully sneak into the building, but she did have to admit that it made things infinitely harder.
As of the moment, there were currently nineteen guards on the outside of the town hall. Fifteen of them were patrolling the streets in groups of five and four were stationed directly in front of the town hall's front door.
From what she could see from her position in the alley, none of the men patrolling the streets carried a firearm and were instead carrying around red-bladed swords and battle-axes. The same didn't apply for the four who were guarding the front door, who were all carrying the same variant of machine gun the two men she had knocked out earlier had.
Her mind immediately went to thoughts of the possibility of entering through the facility's back door, but she dismissed those thoughts when she realized that the same conditions probably applied to the rear of the building.
It was clear to her that she was going to have to work with what she was currently presented with, which incidentally wasn't a whole lot.
Blake had two possible points of entry. She could either go through the front door or a window that had a plastic sheet over it, which she took as a sign that said that the window's glass had broken and somehow went untouched by the guards.
At first glance, this might've seemed like an oversight on their part, but one had to take in account the fact that there were currently fifteen men patrolling the street around it.
'They must've thought that their would be no way someone would be able to get past all of them without being seen,' she mused as her glanced back at the front door, 'Well, I guess it's still a better option than the prior.'
With a plan firmly set in her mind, she waited for an opening in the three patrols and then crouch-ran her towards the plastic-covered window, before squeezing in between the sheet and the window pane into the room beyond.
'That was easier than I expected,' she noted as she slipped into the room, 'Then again, it's not like they're trained soldiers or anything.'
The room she now found herself in could be described as dimly lit at best, so much so that she believed that someone with much worse night vision than her own would be effectively blind if not for the one source of illumination, which happened to be a light coming from a small crack in the slightly ajar door in front of her, one that she assumed lead out to a hallway of some sort.
She made her way over to the door and listened for any sign of a presence waiting behind the door, but when she found nothing, she wrapped her fingers around the knob of the door and she pulled it on it so that there was just enough room for her to slip through.
The bow-wearing bookworm waited a couple of more seconds, just to confirm that there was indeed no one waiting on the other side to ambush her, before doing just that.
'Alright, time to find the others,' she thought to herself as the light of the hallway enveloped her.
The next couple of minutes for Blake were rather uneventful. She pretty much spent that time sneaking around the town hall, going from door to door, looking for the room where the hostages were being kept.
She did have to evade a guard patrol every once in awhile, but doing so was pretty much child's play for her, especially when she found that they were much less disciplined than she had first thought.
For example, they would occasionally stop patrolling the halls to make an offhand comment or stupid joke about some subject she could really care less about, but she really couldn't complain since those temporary lapses of concentration did give her the time she needed to put distance between them and her.
Still, actually finding the room that held her objective proved to be a pretty tedious affair, but she did manage to find them after about fifteen failed attempts.
When she did finally stumble across it, she was surprised to find that the door wasn't locked and even more surprised to find that there were absolutely no guards to speak of inside of the room or around the room, only the hostages who were all kneeling in the center of the room with their hands tied behind their backs with rope.
Upon seeing this, her mind immediately went to it being a trap, but she soon realized after a couple of seconds of carefully scanning the room from a crack in the door, that there indeed was no trap set for her. She found this to be a completely odd and overall idiotic decision on the part of her enemy, but once again, she really wasn't in a position to complain.
"Blake!" she heard her young leader call out to her in a loud whisper the moment she entered the room, "Over here!"
The bow-wearing bookworm's amber eyes immediately turned towards the direction where the voice was coming from and found her teammates kneeling together in the far corner of the room, and unlike the other hostages, their wrists weren't bound together behind their backs with rope.
All of their arms were crossed over in a way that formed a triangle and bound together with handcuffs instead of rope.
'Strange, if they had the wherewithal to tie them up in a different fashion than the other hostages, how could they overlook something as vital as stationing guards to watch over the room?' Blake asked herself as she approached her bound teammates.
"Oh thank goodness you're here!" Weiss exclaimed in a relieved whisper as she approached, "Hurry up and untie me, I can't stand spending another minute tied to this living, blonde-haired ball of impatience!"
"Hey, don't even pretend that I enjoyed a second being tied to you, princess," Yang retorted with a good amount of irritation in her voice, "And for the last time, I am not impatient!"
"You just tried to chew your metal handcuffs off with your teeth!" the heiress of the Schnee fortune shot back with the same amount of irritation.
Her partner opened her mouth to respond, but was promptly cut off when Ruby cut into their argument, "I know you guys don't get along very well with one another, but could you please save your bickering for, I don't know, after we get out of these handcuffs?"
Blake watched on with an amused smile as the two stared at the young team leader in shock for a couple seconds before looking away and mumbling in agreement.
"Good, now that's settled, Blake could you please get these things off of us?" Ruby asked while raising her bound wrists towards the teammate in question with a deep frown that was uncharacteristic of the young team leader, "Those guys took Crescent Rose from me and I want her back NOW."
Having been somewhat shocked by the usually wistful girl's suddenly serious disposition, the original bookworm of team RWBY quickly reached for her own weapon and replied with, "S-sure, give me a second."
She pulled Gambol Shroud from its magnetic holster on her back and went to work unleashing her teammates from their shared captivity.
Three swings. It only took her three swings well placed swings to break the literal chains that bound them together.
Her three teammates' wrists still had the actual cuffs themselves wrapped around them, something she felt somewhat guilty about since she would've had the ability to get them off if she hadn't forgotten her lock picking equipment back at Beacon, but she quelled that guilt when she reminded herself that they would only have to deal with them for a little bit longer.
"Thanks, I didn't know how much more of that I could take," Yang told her as the blonde bounced up to her feet with a vitality one wouldn't normally expect from someone who's spent a good chunk of time chained up, "I swear, I want to go out there and knock a tooth out for every second I spent being tied up in here."
"Make sure to save some teeth for me," Ruby added as she made her way back up to her feet in manner similar to her half-sister's, "No one who dares take my sweet baby away from me is going to keep their teeth."
Weiss let out an exasperated sigh as she stood back up onto her feet, shaking her head as she added a comment of her own, "You two really have to stop spending so much time around Kaneki, I think his violent tendencies are starting to rub off on you."
"You and I both know that I've been like this long before he came into our lives," the older of the two half-sisters countered before suddenly turning her attention toward Blake and asking, "Speaking of him, where is that borderline bipolar teammate of ours?"
"I know that he took a pretty nasty fall earlier, but given his previous track record of surviving things that would kill any normal person, I thought that he'd be up and walking by now," Yang continued on with a slight worried edge to her voice.
"Don't worry, he's fine," the bow-bearing bookworm began, taking a second to take in a breath through her nostrils before explaining the situation further, "As of the moment, he's busy running distraction for me, so that I wouldn't have to deal with too many guards on my way here to free you three."
"'A distraction?'" Weiss repeated with furrowed brows, "So is it safe to assume that the gunfire I heard earlier was caused by him?"
"Yeah, most likely," Blake nodded in affirmation before glancing towards the door she came in through, "And I think that might be a sign that means he needs my help, is it alright if I leave freeing the hostages to you?"
"Of course, why are you even bothering to ask for our permission?" her blonde-haired partner replied in a tone that had a tinge of annoyance to it, "Did you forget that he's our friend too or something?"
"As much as I hate to admit it, Yang is right," Weiss chimed in with her arms crossed over her chest, "We're just as worried about Kaneki's well being as you are."
Ruby nodded in agreement at her partner's words and picked up from where she left off, "Yeah, so you go on ahead and check on him, we'll take care of the hostages."
"Understood," Blake stated as she nodded at her team leader's words, making her way towards the door immediately after.
"And by the way, if you can, leave some of the henchmen left for me!" Yang called out the moment she walked out of the room, "I might not be able to match the number of seconds I spent in here, but I still want to knock some teeth out!"
The bow-wearing bookworm felt an amused smile crawl onto her lips when she heard those words, but immediately frowned when she realized how loud her partner had said them.
'I don't care how untrained these guards are, someone must've heard that,' she thought to herself as quickly crouched down and listened for any sound that might indicate someone approaching her location.
Her eyes narrowed out of suspicion when no sound reached her ears, outside of the sound that was coming from the room behind her that is. There were no footsteps approaching her position, actually she couldn't hear any footsteps at all.
'Okay, something's definitely going on here,' she thought to herself, knowing that there was no possible way that every guard in the building could have stopped moving altogether all at once, 'They must've all left the building when I was speaking with the others.'
'That would explain why I wasn't able to hear them leave, but there's no possible way that they could've known I was doing that at the time unless…' the bow-wearing bookworm continued to muse before glancing back towards the door of the room and giving its frame a much more thorough look over.
Her eyes scanned the frame up and down twice before she noticed a dull red light emanating from the door's strike, one that she hadn't noticed due to the light coming in from the hallway. She moved back towards where the light was coming from and peered into the strike.
There, sitting deep inside of the strike, was a device she was immediately able to recognized from her stealth excursions in the past: a motion tracker.
'A motion tracker?' she asked herself mentally, 'Does that mean they were using the hostages as a diversion to cover their retreat?'
'If they weren't planning on using the hostages to collect ransom money, what were they trying to do-' she began to ask herself once more, but stopped herself when she remembered that Kaneki still might be in danger, 'You can sit and wonder about it after you help Kaneki.'
So with that thought in mind, she made her way out of the town hall and began her search for Kaneki.
Wind blew through Neo's multi-colored hair as she looked out through the open side door of the BullHead, which was currently carrying her farther and farther away from the settlement she had spent the past couple days taking over.
"You couldn't just stay dead, could you Haise?" she muttered under her breath, her fingers balling into tightly clenched fists as she thought back to the young man she had thought to be long dead no less than a couple of hours ago.
She thought she had stabbed him dead, and that if that didn't kill him, the fall out of the BullHead surely would. He was supposed to be dead and rotting out in the Emerald Forest, but as it turns out, he was far from it.
Actually, other than the new look he got for himself, she honestly thought that he never looked better.
Those five men she saw him take out before she had ambushed him were far from being on the same level as trained soldiers, but they should've at least lasted longer than five seconds.
He should've had that trademark guilty expression of his plastered all over his face when he finished dispatching them, but instead he wore an annoyed expression that made it seem like they were nothing more than a bother to him.
His hair should've been jet black and his gray eyes should've been soft and doe-eyed, but instead his hair was snow white and his eyes were hardened and narrowed to a point.
The first thing he should've done the moment he noticed her running towards her was turn and try to dodge the attack before trying to reason with whoever attacked him, but he instead lashed out at her with his sword with full intent of killing his attacker.
When their eyes first met, his should've been filled with recognition and betrayal, not confusion and cold indifference.
During their fight, he should've been trying his hardest to land a blow that would simply incapacitate her, not recklessly going after the killing blow with every attack, and he sure as hell shouldn't have been fighting with tentacles made of a liquid that sprouted out from his back.
These were all things Neo thought should've happened during their encounter and none of them turned out to be true, but despite managing to surprise her, they really didn't negatively affect her all too much.
Truth be told, she actually thought most of them, the two exceptions being his new appearance and his initial reaction to seeing her again, to be welcomed improvements over what they previously were.
However, there was one change, one that she had yet to list, that actually managed to sting her slightly: his smile, it should've been one that was kind and as radiant as the sun, not sadistic and cold as the surface of the ever crescent moon.
That kind smile of his was the same one that had always picked her up when she felt down, so it was probably natural for her to feel somewhat pained at seeing it so twisted. Then again, she herself was probably the reason why it had become so twisted in the first place, so who was she to complain?
"Uh, excuse me m'am," she heard one of the low-level thugs her boss had hired out to assist her on this endeavor say from behind her, prompting her to shake herself from her stupor glance at the man from over her shoulder with a raised eyebrow that told him continue speaking, "The boss is waiting for your report."
"Tell him that we've successfully gotten the information we need from out of our target," the multi-color haired woman instructed, "And also, tell him that I'll speak when we get back to base, I need some time to think about a few things."
The thug nodded his head and she directed her gaze back through the side door in front of her.
Blake didn't know what she expected to find when she finally came across Kaneki, but she definitely didn't expect what she actually found.
She didn't expect to find buildings with large chunks torn out of them, and she definitely didn't expect to find the white-haired teammate she was looking for sitting down on the ground with his back leaning against one of those nearly completely destroyed walls, head hanging so that his face wasn't visible from underneath his messy white hair.
For a while, she just stood there and stared at his hunched figure as her mind frantically searched for a way of approaching him.
Normally, she would've just went over to him and asked if he was alright, but she could tell that there was something off about him the moment she laid eyes on him. She remembered feeling something similar when he first started to regain consciousness after his fall out of the BullHead.
For whatever reason, the Kaneki she was currently staring at just didn't feel like the same person she knew and had befriended.
"My body seems to be pretty tenacious," she heard the white-haired young man began to murmur under his breath, using a bitter tone that made it seem like he said those words once before in the past, "If it's as damaging then emotional things have always had a greater effect on me."
"Hey Kaneki, are you al-" the bow-wearing bookworm began to ask him, but he cut her off before she could finish the question.
"Is that what I said all those months ago?" he asked himself, completely oblivious to her presence as he suddenly raised his head up and up towards the night sky and at the ever-crescent room, which revealed his once hidden face to the world and what was revealed filled her with a maelstrom of confusion and shock.
His eyes, which had always seemed to be filled with either emptiness or kindness, were filled with an emotion that she had only ever seen them bear once before after his initiation, but the amount that she had seen then seemed like a fraction of the amount being shown now.
Though, the single stream of liquid that ran down the right side of his face, something that she had only noticed because of the reflection of the moonlight that had been caused when he angled his head towards the sky.
Sadness, that was the emotion that had taken over his usually barren gray eyes, but one wouldn't be able to tell that from the expression he was wearing. His face retained that same stone cold expression that lacked any and all emotion, the one that he always wore.
He was shedding tears, yet his face didn't contort nor did his breathing hitch; he wasn't frowning, yet he was so obviously wrought with sadness.
It was almost as if feeling the emotion wasn't affecting him at all.
"Even after all I've been through, those words still manage to ring true," he said suddenly, snapping Blake from her daze almost instantaneously.
She watched as he moved his right hand from off on top his corresponding knee and placed it over his stomach, clenching it lightly with his black-tipped fingers as he continued speaking, "I wonder…"
Something suddenly emerged from the lower-right corner of his left eye and ran down the length of his pale face, catching the moonlight's reflection all the way down.
"... I wonder, if that's the reason why it hurts so much."
-Chapter End-
Well, that's a wrap folks. I don't really have much to say much about the story other than I already have the next chapter planned out so expect it to come out somewhere around a month as well.
I do however have something to say about the world outside this story however.
As some of you may know, Imperial Scans, the original English translators for the Tokyo Ghoul: re, have shut down down all operations. I have to thank and applaud the guys over at Imperial for consistently pushing out a good product and filling my life with the tragedy that is Tokyo Ghoul every week, for over a year, though I'm still sad that you guys are going to be gone.
Thankfully for those who still follow :re on a weekly basis, mangastream has accepted to take over the translating responsibilities for the series. I haven't seen most of their previous work, but I have read their 'Happiness' translation and I thought they did a pretty good job of it from what I've seen, so I do trust them to a good job.
Well, a good enough job that it'll last us until Twisted Hel finally catches up with the manga, which will probably be in the next couple years because they don't post regularly at all. Seriously Twisted, I love how clean and thorough your scans are, but you have to find a way of doing it more consistently.
So that's pretty much all I have to say. Hopefully you enjoyed the chapter and until next time, peace out!
P.S: "Fuck Touka."- Imperial Scans.