Akira's katabasis lite
Her radio crackled to life. "Akira, you still out there?"
She fumbled for it and looked around at the suddenly empty street. "Yeah. Still heading south."
"Okay. I'm not seeing any good cross streets and I think the coast is clear. I'm coming over."
Within thirty seconds, Touka dropped in from above and landed quietly beside her. Standing up, she looked at Akira. "You okay? You look a little…"
"Yeah, I'm fine. Let's keep going. We don't have a ton of time." Akira was beginning to wonder if her strange conversation had even happened. Still. She pointed in the newer direction he had given her—a shorter, barely visible outcropping in the shadow of the taller stalk next to it. "We need to head to that one."
"Why?"
"Call it a hunch."
"Sometimes I feel kind of bad that I dragged you into…all of this, but I'm glad you're here."
Akira shook her head. "If I recall, I practically dove in headfirst and then kept digging myself deeper. Don't feel bad. I could have turned you in any time I wanted and gotten out, and I didn't."
Touka laughed halfheartedly. They kept walking, over and around the various obstacles.
It's strange, how quickly all the destruction started to seem normal. Every time she glanced along the nearest visible portions of the Dragon, the spike of fear that hit her was smaller and smaller. Incomprehensible horrors quickly become comprehensible, it just takes a bit of time and familiarity.
A half a block later, the radio came to life again. They were happily informed that most of the group had made it safely back towards the CCG line, and a few of the braver ones were happily leading Furuta's special forces in a steeplechase across the city.
Still, the clock was ticking on how long their enemies could stay distracted.
"Excellent. We're en route, no ETA yet. Get that helicopter warmed up for us," Akira relayed.
Touka spoke up again. "You stay so calm when shit like this happens. You came up with a plan. I would have rushed out all angry and tried to come up with some sort of terrible idea on the way."
"I am…extremely not calm right now. You can either give in to panic and then you still have to figure out the problem, or skip the first part and go straight to figuring out the problem. I figure you get it over with faster the second way."
She didn't mention that not giving in to panic was a lot easier said than done. Akira also believed in the value of appearing somewhat in control during a crisis, if only to keep everyone else from panicking.
"That's…one way of looking at it."
Soon, they were closing in on their destination. Both were looking around and keeping their ears open, but they'd reached an area that was suspiciously quiet. It left the two of them feeling jumpy.
"We need to get in from underneath," Akira said. "Be on the lookout for any good way to head down."
Touka quickly scrambled up a crooked street light nearby. She walked back and forth across the pole with the ease of a leopard as she looked over the path before them. "Problem solved." Dropping back to the ground, she said, "A part of the street caved into the subway system up ahead. Why do we have to go in from beneath, again?"
Akira searched for some sort of rational answer. If there was no clear reason, she didn't want to blindly follow that face-changing ghoul's directions. Pointing at the part of the Dragon nearest them, she observed, "It looks like it's surrounded by a mountain of rubble. It's probably too unstable to go up the outside."
"Okay…but if heading underground is a bust, we turn around within five minutes."
"Agreed." Akira checked her watch. "It's been just over two hours. At worst, she'll be cranky because her nap was delayed."
Touka smiled, faintly, but didn't respond.
"Let's go," Akira declared.
They approached the sinkhole. The road was tilting down, like a convenient ramp into hell. At the maw, they looked at each other—checking one last time if the other was going to balk. Slowly, they
Without any signal, Touka and Akira slowed halfway down the ramp, letting their eyes adjust to the darkness.
And froze.
Sitting on a bench at the end of the platform, as if he was waiting for the next train, was the boy that had caused this whole predicament. "Took you long enough."
"Where's my daughter," Touka growled through gritted teeth.
He stood, hands still in his pockets. "Handed her off to Furuta, like he asked. I wanted to earn some brownie points with him. He's gonna be in charge after you're all dead."
"I'll kill you, you bastard," Touka's kagune ripped through the back of her jacket. It crackled as it unfurled, looking more dangerous and wilder than Akira had ever seen before.
"Try me," responded the Oggai. In return, his kagune unrolled from behind him. The fearsome limbs swished against the ground, like snakes about to bite.
"Some punk with Rize's kagune? Step aside, Akira. I've got this." Before Akira could stop her, the ghoul took off at a run, tumbling over and under the kagune as the boy lashed out at her, firing RC crystals with shocking precision as she twisted through the air.
His leg, his stomach, one hand—all direct hits. But healing rapidly.
He'd brushed off that first round easily enough. But he was also young, relatively inexperienced, and not used to fighting alone.
Touka was being aggressive—firing her kagune from afar, getting close, getting kicks and punches to his body, and dancing away around support columns before he could parry. He blocked a couple of attacks at first but couldn't move fast enough to keep up with Touka for very long. She managed to land a hard chop to the boy's throat before darting back again, panting hard.
Akira could hear the choking noise he made while he backed away and flailed his kagune around, trying to buy room for his trachea to heal. It was only a short break in the action before they both went at it again, but it was the first sign that Touka hitting the wall was the main obstacle—she had the upper hand in skill and speed.
Too much going on to get close without hurting her, she thought. How to bring this to an end fast?
She realized that if she took a step back behind one of the support columns, she'd be completely out of view of the Oggai.
She leaned her quinque against the wall and reached into her cargo pockets. Akira reasoned, Okay, I have RC suppressant grenades and a small grappling hook. And lots of columns. Surely there's some way to get the grenade to the boy and not Touka.
From her hiding place behind the pillar, Akira fired the grappling hook at a wall, across the wide-open corridor that usually allowed huge crowds of passengers to flood through during their rush hour commute. The noise was lost under the sounds of fighting. Pulling on the filament to make sure it was secure, she unspooled another armful by hand and locked the pistol so it wouldn't retract.
She awkwardly wrapped the remaining slack around the RC suppressant cannister and tied it up as fast as she could. If you can't tie knots, tie lots, she thought darkly as her eyes darted over to Touka, dodging another blow and somersaulting backwards to get out of her opponent's range.
And she was starting to look very winded. She has to be running out of gas.
"Touka, back to the exit!" Akira stepped into the open, not even holding her quinque. Not a threat at all.
The ghoul didn't hesitate, she took off towards Akira. The Oggai was taken off guard by the sudden disengagement but sped after her.
When she was close enough, Akira yelled, "Duck!" and started sprinting towards the Oggai—but veered off to one side. It happened quick—Touka dropped into a slide and went right under the nearly invisible line, Akira flung the pistol/RC grenade contraption in her hand as hard as she could past the Oggai boy, and he ran chest first into the cable.
The weight of the projectile swinging around behind him, combined with him yanking the filament in the other direction, caused the payload to swing around him once…twice…and skitter along the ground around his ankles before coming to a stop. The sudden tangle he found himself in jerked at the end of the rope still fixed in the opposite wall, and he was wrenched off his feet with a yelp .
"Can you hit that cannister on the ground by him?"
"Yeah…sure…" Touka gasped out. She sent a single shard flying.
The contents of the can exploded with a pop that echoed off into the underground darkness. Soon, the boy was shrouded in a cloud of RC suppressant gas. They were shielded from any wind, so it lingered over him.
Through the haze, his continued struggling was visible. He managed to untangle himself and get to his feet, but when he tried to swipe one red tentacle at them, it crumbled. Looking more distressed, now, he turned and tried to run but kept stumbling to his knees.
Touka circled around him with long steps.
With one final blow, Touka staked him to the subway wall behind him. The crackling light of her own kagune threw threatening red shadows across his face.
He struggled against the shard through his shoulder in futility for a moment, then went limp.
"You're not even half as good at dodging as Kaneki was," she said coldly.
He turned his face away, but they could both hear him begin to cry quietly.
The rage drained out of Akira. She could feel nothing but pity for the poor endling. Fetching her sidelined polearm, she called over her shoulder, "Where did you bring her?"
He sniffled. "To Furuta. I don't know."
Touka stepped up. "I want to know, why. Just why?"
"Because he told me to! What, am I supposed to say no and just go to an orphanage?! I don't have anything else!"
"What's your name," Akira asked.
He remained stubbornly silent.
"She asked you a question." Touka reached out to grab her RC crystal, twisting it deeper through his shoulder.
"Aah! Hajime!" Then, more tearfully, "My name's Hajime. Shit. Stop it."
Touka snarled, "You don't get to make requests. Which way did Furuta go?"
"You should be thanking him," Hajime sneered. "I was in that building. You're all pretending to be on the same side, acting like all the killing never happened. He gave you a bigger enemy to hate together."
That struck a note of unease in Akira. Is that all we did? Just redirected hatred and violence at a more convenient target?
And for some reason, she thought of Juzo and Hinami discussing their assorted amputations.
"No," she said. It wasn't about giving us a new target to unite us in hate…it was about showing us that we were all suffering together. "That's not what he did at all."
In a move that happened so fast it surprised Akira, Touka walked up beside her and casually ripped the quinque out of her hands. Before the investigator could react, the ghoul had lopped off one of the boy's arms and was holding the blade behind one of his knees.
He screamed, the kind of real, ragged pain and fear that would likely haunt Akira for years to come. But…she couldn't stop it just yet. The violence Touka was exhibiting was disturbing, but it had a purpose.
"I won't ask again. Which way did Furuta go?"
Again, he started crying. "It doesn't matter. You're going to kill me no matter what."
Matter-of-factly, Akira said, "No. If you don't talk, we would beat you within an inch of your life, leave you for dead, and then quietly follow you when you crawled back to Furuta. You wouldn't even know you were giving him up."
Touka growled at Akira, "Don't tell him that."
Akira waved her away. "We don't have time for that, anyways." Turning back to the boy, she said, "Talk now, and we'll just leave you. There's no irreparable damage yet. You just walk away in an hour or two."
Touka opened her mouth to argue with Akira, but thought better of it. Instead, she pressed the blade into Hajime's knee a fraction of an inch more. "Hurry up. Knees are a bitch to heal."
"Fine! He headed up that line!" He pointed with his only hand towards one of several tunnels from the intersecting lines running through the station.
"Thanks." The ghoul stepped back and gave the weapon back to Akira. "Do you want to do the honors?"
"No," said Akira. She really didn't. The boy was now beaten up, down an arm, staked to the wall, and Touka had probably cut a tendon or two in his knee. And this wasn't like the first time she'd called for his death—he didn't look like a threat anymore, just a pathetic child who'd believed the wrong adult's promises.
This is a terrible time to grow squeamish. "He's incapacitated. I said he could walk away if he talked. Let's at least have some integrity. Plus we might have more questions in a couple of minutes."
"If you say so. If the twerp is lying we'll know exactly where to find him." Then she turned around and fired a second shard into his other shoulder, just as the first one was visibly beginning to break down. He didn't even scream that time, just gasped and jerked like a fish on a hook.
Then Akira walked up and located what was left of the grappling hook's loose cable, and looped it tightly around his feet for good measure. "You try to start shit again, I kill you, no questions asked. Say you understand."
"I…understand," he whimpered.
"After this, I think I don't ever want to be underground ever again," Akira said.
They'd trekked down the tracks past several dark stations, at times finding surprising flickers of emergency lights still on, and spending long stretches in near darkness. Akira had to listen carefully for Touka's steps in front of her. When it became impossibly dark through a couple of sections, the glow of Touka's kagune led the way—not just for bioluminescence, but because they didn't know when they might run into company.
"I don't blame you." Touka was trying to hold back a quiet cough. "Yeah, you're right, there's something weird going on. It reeks...worse than it usually does down here." Even her voiceless whisper seemed to carry through the vast tunnel system.
Akira nodded. She could catch a hint of—not quite the stainless-steel smell of blood, but something in the air that sparked the same exhilaration and terror. She tightened her grip on her polearm.
Touka pointed up onto the platform of the nearby station they were passing by. All the connecting hallways and exits looked blocked, and the far end of the station was caved in.
Hopping up on the platform, they both followed Touka's nose over the turnstiles and up the stairs—it was getting lighter, in a dim, softened way. They emerged from what looked like the only intact exit to see that they were right next to the giant monster.
The alien bloom visible from across the city—one of the oviducts, she'd heard it called by the research team—was towering over them. Akira had a moment of vertigo as she craned her head back to stare straight up. Its immense size dwarfed them. It wasn't immediately accessible to them, though. They'd emerged right in the epicenter of a relatively small offshoot from its base.
It was wrapped around a multistory contemporary art museum. Before she fell over backwards, she turned around to survey further. "We're…surrounded on all sides. Like in the coils of a snake." As she watched, a slight ripple went through the whole thing as it adjusted its grip on the building.
Touka, too, was staring up at the vertical walls of flesh that were hemming them in. "Nowhere else to go but there," she pointed. With the hundred-foot-high living barrier on one side, and the glass façade of the building on the other, the only way left was to step in through a broken panel.
In the lobby, a huge glass sculpture that had once hung over the reception desk had fallen and shattered, covering the floor with opalescent sharp pieces. Hope no one was sitting there when it happened, she thought with a nervous twist in her stomach. She still found it strangely beautiful.
Akira spotted the next clue. Ichika's favorite stuffed bunny rabbit, lying on the carpet of glass. Nearby, there was a massive escalator—now out of service and looking a little crooked—going up one side of the building. On a good day, it probably took people up several floors and along the way treated them to a panorama of the street outside. Now, all it showed was the plate glass windows buckling under the force of the Dragon obscuring any view.
"Up those stairs. The toy probably fell over the side."
Touka strode over and began climbing.
For some reason this reminds me of slaughterhouses…the way cows walk themselves down a one-way path to the kill room.
They reached the top. Plenty of seating areas even in the middle of the main walking path, pillars, half-walls dividing the floor into different areas…it was one of those places that felt open until looking around and realizing how terrible the sight lines were in every direction. And—an added annoyance—art pieces of irregular sizes and shapes were scattered about on the floors, on the ceiling, jutting out of walls.
"Where next?"
"When I saw him, he was standing on the thing next door. I think he's somewhere around here. I suppose we keep heading up until one of us spots something," Akira whispered as she sidestepped some sort of dangling yarn-based installation.
They looked around on high alert. Akira's heart pounded, expecting an enemy to pop out from around every corner. Her quinque switched hands several times while she searched, as she kept needing to dry her clammy palms on her shirt.
Soon, though, they realized the truth. The structure had seemed fairly intact so far, but the far side of it was not. The elevators weren't working, and the stairways leading higher were blocked, too—they'd buckled in under the pressure of the Dragon's tendril wrapped around it. It had also completely shattered the windows on the far side. The resulting cold breeze didn't comfort Akira.
There was no easy way to continue, and yet Ichika had come this way and was nowhere to be seen.
She walked back to look at the way they came up, at the Dragon's eyespots on the other side of the window that seemed to stare right at her. Turning around, she caught Touka's eye.
"We might need to go outside. Out one of the broken windows, on the Dragon."
The ghoul nodded.
But as they crossed back towards the damaged side of the building, a new noise sounded over the rustling of the wind. A…high-pitched voice.
On reflex, Akira dove behind a nearby half-wall while Touka stepped behind a large papier-mâché sculpture of a tree.
"Buh-buh!"
Growing from faint to loud, she could hear Furuta's response. "Do you ever stop talking? You were the dum-dum who threw it. I told you I wasn't going back for it but if it'll shut you up…"
"Buh!"
He lifted his head, sensing the opponents before him. Furuta looked around. It took him a second, but he still sensed the two of them in hiding. "Ah, do we have company? I wonder if they're here to appreciate this fine collection."
Touka must have decided that it wasn't worth keeping up the charade and stepped back into the open.
Figuring he must be distracted keeping an eye on Touka, Akira peeked around the corner.
The ghoul didn't scream, or yell, or react much at all…aside from her eyes suddenly shifting red.
Just a silent, still predator with murder on her mind.
The erstwhile chairman wasn't intimidated. He pushed a nearby ceramic abstract sculpture off its large pedestal—it thunked on the floor and cracked into pieces—and set Ichika atop it instead. "Stay."
It was really her this time. She looked totally unharmed, albeit grumpy. She made a frustrated noise at being unceremoniously left and started kicking and twisting in an apparent attempt to roll over.
As he strutted towards them, he kept himself directly between her and her rescuer. "Now, you're not supposed to be here! Don't tell me you roughed up that nice young man I left to guard the way here."
Touka moved towards him, step by step, trying to get a clear shot.
Furuta was smarter than that. He quickly backed up, getting closer to Ichika. "Ah, ah, I'd think twice if I were you!"
Touka froze where she was.
"And come on out, you blonde backstabber, I know you're here, too."
Akira cautiously stepped out from behind the wall she'd crouched behind and moved to Touka's side.
Akira could handle pressure. She could.
This was very tricky, though.
It was a problem to be solved. Overwhelming as a big picture, but the next step was clear…get close to Ichika without Furuta hurting her.
She thought of the way Furuta ate that bullet. He had so much more practice fighting than the Oggai did, and that was before factoring in a kagune. They simply wouldn't win in a fight. That option was completely off the table.
If one of them could just get close enough to grab the child…her mind started spinning.
She swallowed hard, fighting the urge to glance over at Touka. Furuta would catch that. He could read people like a book, in a way that Akira could never dream of—but maybe Akira had a weapon of her own, an inscrutable expression that rendered her unreadable. Hopefully.
He was a ruthless schemer, and she'd faced similar accusations. But at the end of the day, her veneer of cold-heartedness seemed to mislead most people, including—she hoped—him. He thinks I'm a traitor with ice in my veins, doesn't he?
She brandished her quinque at Furuta, and took two careful steps back.
This all ticked through her mind at a lightning-fast pace, during that intense stare-down with Furuta.
Which is why it was such a surprise to Touka when Akira pivoted struck her in the side with her blade. It was a clean hit across her mid-back, enough to shock her into collapsing with a scream and leave a neat slice of blood across her spine.
She followed up with a quick stab, practically skewering the ghoul to the ground through her kakuho—or at least, it would have, if Touka wielded a kokako instead of an ukaku. Please play dead.
Wiping the blade on her pants leg, Akira looked up at Furuta. "Now. How would you feel about a friendly chat?"
I'm…80% sure that Touka never gets an official rating of her own separate from Ayato. And I think there's also a lack of good knock-down drag-out 1v1 fights with her in TG:Re but it looks a lot like she levelled up with the two wings and such. I think it's kind of amusing if she chilled out enough to mostly stay out of trouble, but would be rated like S or SS and is actually one of the more dangerous ghouls in play, and thus has the skills and experience to easily go up against some kid with Rize's kagune.
And I know that, like, geographically I'm pretty sure there's no real-world museum in the area where some of the action takes place. I've tried to keep details pretty vague for that reason. It's just soooo boring to keep writing (and reading!) about stuff happening in office buildings!
Next week: Akira is not opposed to dirty tricks