Kanesaki dodged under a wide horizontal swing, the blade of the axe howling through the air just above his scalp. He rolled sideways, kicking up blood-soaked gravel, and used the momentum to launch a low slash across Tashiro's ribs. The edge caught flesh - not deep - but enough to draw a pained snarl from the rogue.
'You're insane!' Kanesaki hissed, breath heavy. His body screamed, muscles trembling with fatigue, each move slower than the last.
Tashiro grinned, eyes bloodshot and wild. 'I'm free!'
Another swing. Kanesaki raised his blade - too late. The axe clipped his shoulder, slicing through the black fabric and piercing skin.
Pulling the axe back, Tashiro didn't hesitate. He was on him in seconds, raising the axe overhead.
'You think you're better than me just because you're in uniform!?'
The axe came down - and Kanesaki twisted, barely managing to grab the shaft mid-swing, muscles tensing harder. Lifting his knees up, Kanesaki pushed back, freeing himself from imminent death, too worn out to swing back.
Tashiro snarled as the momentum faltered, his strength battling Kanesaki's desperation in a deadlock. The two grappled, the axe trembling between them as sparks danced where metal scraped metal. Their eyes locked - Kanesaki's filled with grit, Tashiro's a firestorm of fractured rage.
'You think that uniform means something!?'
Tashiro roared, forcing the axe closer, its edge now inches from Kanesaki's throat.
'We all wore it once! They cheered for us, saluted us - and then left us in the dirt!'
Kanesaki's feet slid back across the gravel, his arms buckling. With a final surge of strength, he twisted to the side and redirected the axe into the ground with a heavy clang. He followed with a desperate elbow to Tashiro's jaw, stunning him for half a second.
That was all he needed.
Kanesaki drove his shoulder into Tashiro's chest, toppling them both onto the hangar floor. They rolled over each other, a blur of fists, knees, and bleeding grunts. Tashiro tried to reach for a knife on his belt, but Kanesaki slammed his forearm into the rogue's throat, pinning him.
'You want someone to blame!?'
Kanesaki shouted, his vision swimming.
'Blame the bastards in charge! Not the ones still fighting! Not the ones who didn't quit!'
Tashiro coughed hard, spitting blood in Kanesaki's face, still laughing.
'You think you're still a soldier… but you're just a fool still playing human!'
Something in Kanesaki snapped. With a guttural cry, he reared back and punched Tashiro square in the face - again, and again. Bone cracked. Blood sprayed across the ground. When his fist finally slowed, Tashiro lay beneath him, unconscious… or dead, his face still intact but awfully mangled.
Kanesaki stumbled up, panting, eyes wide and unfocused. He looked down at his trembling, bloodied hands.
'…I'm still pretending', he whispered.
The hangar was silent but for the distant echo of fire.
Kanesaki staggered to his feet, clutching his ribs as pain throbbed through his side. His shattered blade hung limp in one hand, streaked with blood, his other arm nearly numb from the last exchange. He glanced around the ruined hangar - bodies, wreckage, scattered weapon crates. No more sounds of fighting. Just the low rumble of fire and distant thunder.
He let out a ragged breath, wiping the blood from his mouth.
A harsh click echoed behind him.
Kanesaki spun - too late.
Tashiro stood, shotgun in hand, the right side of his face a pulpy mess. His smile, however, was intact.
'Taking a breather, really?' Rasping, he aimed upwards.
The shotgun blasted.
Kanesaki threw himself behind a scorched crate, the shot tearing through his shirt and searing his back. Splinters flew. Another blast came, deafening. He rolled, landing hard behind a storage rack.
Tashiro laughed, circling, dragging a combat knife across the crate tops as he passed.
'You're not walking out of here. You and me - we finish it right here.'
Kanesaki gritted his teeth, shouting back, 'When we do… I walk out alone.'
Glancing at his hands, his blade was still shattered - practically useless. Hearing the footsteps grow closer, his eyes darted around the inferno for a way out. Nothing. He closed his eyes for a moment, sighing painfully, his free hand brushing his hair back as he squatted, ready to leap.
Sliding over the crate, Kanesaki swung downwards, just missing an off-guard Tashiro.
Tashiro stepped back, blood soaking through his coat, knife twitching in his grip. He raised the shotgun with one arm, laughing through gritted teeth.
'You're done, kid.'
Kanesaki charged, blade drawn back for a final strike - until the shotgun .boomed.
A deafening blast erupted between them.
The shot hit square against Kanesaki's blade mid-swing. The brittle, dark crimson metal, already cracked from their earlier fight, shattered in his hands. The blade splintered into a spray of steel shards, the impact throwing Kanesaki backward across the ground.
He crashed into a crate, gasping, staring down at the broken hilt still clutched in his palm. It was nothing now. Just a jagged grip and a stump of ruined steel.
Across from him, Tashiro limped forward, chuckling hoarsely. Smoke hissed from the shotgun's barrel. 'That sword's dead,' he coughed, lifting the knife. 'Just like you.'
Kanesaki didn't reply. He stared at the hilt, at his hands - bloody, trembling. He could feel the weapon crying out, empty, unfinished.
Then he looked up at Tashiro's chest, watched the blood still leaking from that shallow wound. Slowly, a thought formed.
No... not finished.
Not yet.
Kanesaki pushed himself to his feet, each breath jagged, smoke curling around him like a veil. The broken blade glinted a faint red in his grasp - a mockery of its former self. Tashiro sneered, raising the knife.
'What, gonna jab me with a toothpick?'
Kanesaki didn't answer. He lunged.
The broken blade whipped forward in tight, vicious arcs - shorter, yes, but still fast, still lethal. Tashiro was caught off guard by the sudden burst. A slash skimmed his shoulder, another cut across his wrist. He stumbled back, shotgun slipping slightly from his grasp.
Kanesaki's broken blade clanged against steel, scraped across leather, met flesh but never deep enough. He was slowing again. Tashiro grinned wider with every miss, every desperate swing.
'You're spent,' the rogue panted. 'And that toothpick won't save you.'
Kanesaki didn't answer.
Instead, he let his next strike fall short - deliberate. A feint. Then he slipped the jagged edge forward, dragging it just deep enough along Tashiro's exposed side to open skin. Blood sprayed, a shallow cut, nothing fatal. Tashiro scoffed and shoved him back.
'That's it?!' he barked, raising the knife again.
But Kanesaki wasn't focused on him anymore. His hand twitched around the hilt. The shattered blade pulsed faintly.
Tashiro blinked. 'What are you-?'
And then it happened.
A violent snap of pressure rippled through the air. The broken sword, still wedged in Tashiro's side, began it's metamorphosis. The blade drank like a lung starved of air.
Tashiro's scream choked off as the metal inside him grew, twisted, forged anew from within his own body. A sharp, searing heat bloomed in his core.
Kanesaki stepped back as the sword reformed from the inside - its full length erupting outward with a wet, crunching roar. It burst from Tashiro's shoulder like a razor fang, splitting his chest wide open.
Tashiro twitched once. Then silence.
He fell backwards, blade still embedded, the ruin of his torso split halfway like a log struck by lightning.
Kanesaki stood over the rogue, breath shaking, fresh crimson dripping from the reformed sword. He looked down, gripping the hilt, yanking it free from his opponent's body.
'Thanks for the steel,' he muttered.
He turned away as the firelight caught the new edge, gleaming - shaped not by forge or furnace, but by war, blood, and survival.
Kanesaki turned, letting his muscles finally loosen - but the sound behind him froze his spine.
A wet cough.
Then a staggering breath.
He spun around just in time to see Tashiro's body convulse, boots scraping against the scorched floor as he stood back up, chest gaping, face soaked in blood and ash. His eyes were wide, half-blind, pupils shaking as raw hatred dragged him upright. One hand gripped the shotgun, the other fumbled beneath his shredded coat.
'You're... Just another number... Piece of shit...'
He rasped violently, his fingers curling around a glass vial along his belt filled with a thick, glowing crimson - Y-cells, undiluted and unstable, reacting violently to the heat around them.
The shotgun clicked.
Kanesaki's jaw clenched.
'You never shut up...'
He kicked open a nearby crate, snatched a dented oil canister, and hurled it across the air like a fastball.
The instant it struck the barrel of the shotgun, the flames were released.
The blast engulfed Tashiro in a pillar of flame, erupting with violent force. Shrapnel and fire shredded through the air as the vial burst in his hand, feeding the inferno with volatile energy. His final scream was guttural, panicked - and then cut off, swallowed by the blaze.
Kanesaki shielded his face, heat washing over him in waves.
Ash rained down.
'…I warned you,' he muttered, lowering his arm.
The flames danced in the reflection of his blade, now whole again - reforged by the blood of a man who wouldn't stay dead, but couldn't win.
Not anymore.
Kanesaki stepped back from the flames, letting the heat roll over him like a wave. The fight was over. It had to be over.
But then - a pulse.
Low, rhythmic. Like a heartbeat thudding through the very air.
He paused, frowning as the fire turned an unnatural shade of red. Glowing veins of crimson light began to spiderweb through the charred remains of Tashiro's body, twitching aggressively within the flame. The broken vial, now fused to what was left of his hand, sizzled - the Y-cells boiling over and sinking into the flesh, refusing to die.
'What the..!?' Kanesaki murmured.
Tashiro's limbs bent wrong. The mangled torso began stretching, warping as bone split and regrew, muscle knitting over glowing sinew like liquid tar. The fire didn't consume him - it fed him. What remained of his face tore away with a sickening crack, revealing a long, jagged bird-like skull, sharp-beaked and crowned with curling, pitch-black horns.
Kanesaki raised his sword, eyes wide.
The creature that rose from the wreckage was no Chimera.
It was a Yatzul, having devoured the Chimera, evolving.
Glowing, dark crimson muscle throbbed across its frame like molten sinew, pulsing with unstable power. Its arms hung low, grotesquely elongated, ending in massive claws that clicked with each flex. Two jagged legs clawed into the ground, keeping it low and beastlike. Its breathing sounded like grinding metal, echoing from deep within its twisted chest.
And that skull like a demonized carrion bird, grinning through flame.
Kanesaki exhaled sharply. '...Of course.'
The creature screeched, a distorted, echoing sound that split the air like a siren from hell.
Kanesaki gripped his blade tighter.
Chapter 28 - end