We simply looked and were looked at, touched and were touched—we were groping about blindly, clumsily, violently, and yet without either of us ever thinking that.
I looked—at Toriko, with my blue right eye.
She was radiant in my vision. I could see the silver phosphorescence of her left hand enter my body, moving up and down inside my pelvis. When that sight overlapped with the regular vision in my left field of view, it was really, really pretty.
It was the first time I’d looked directly at Toriko for so long. I’d used my right eye on Toriko once before, to remove the curses that had gotten inside her when we got wrecked by the Kotoribako, but even then it was incredibly brief. Despite that, Toriko had still started getting weird that time, so there was no way that this longer exposure wasn’t going to have an effect.
However, the way that effect manifested was different from any other time before now.
The people I’d driven mad with my right eye before now had mostly exhibited increased aggression. I’d half expected the same from Toriko, but I was fine with that. But instead, she became more and more...unraveled.
Like a tightly woven textile coming apart at the edges, the elements that made up Toriko broke apart and spread out. I’d also seen her in a similar state that time with the Kotoribako, and with the Time-space Man too. My right eye was triggering the same effect now.
The words Tsuji had said crossed my mind. Something about my evil eye feeling like it was specialized towards breaking people because of its effect on the integrity of the mind. True to those words, Toriko gradually disintegrated before my eyes. The elements that constituted the human being called Toriko spread out like the branches of a tree. A multi-dimensional tree diagram expanding explosively. If I focused on any one part of it, Toriko became rude, polite, lewd, or embarrassed. I didn’t have the composure to focus or think as I watched, so Toriko changed from one thing to another as my gaze wandered. Laughing, getting angry, crying, fearing, moaning—feeling as if she were flowing from one state to the next, in constant flux, and yet in all of them simultaneously.
Honestly, it wouldn’t have been unusual for me to panic at this point. Toriko was going to pieces more thoroughly than I’d ever seen before, and it was happening right before my eyes, after all. But that’s not what happened. Toriko looked beautiful, opening before me like a flower in bloom, and I was aware of every minute branch of the tree, down to their very tips. There was another perspective, distinct from the one that was going crazy together with Toriko, that had a total grasp of everything that was going on. I was sure that this me, if I wanted it to, would be able to restore Toriko to her original form, much like winding back the clock.
At the same time, Toriko’s hands were also touching me.
My senses had already gone nuts, and I was thrilled to have Toriko touch me absolutely anywhere. I couldn’t tell her right hand from her left, or where either was touching.
Toriko’s hand was exposing me more and more. I was already naked, so there shouldn’t have been any more for me to take off, and yet Toriko’s hand tore away the shell that I’d been wearing. All of these thick things I’d had no idea I was wearing were taken off of me one after another. As I was feeling vulnerable, with the things that had protected me taken away, her warm right hand and cool left slid inside me. I had no idea what she was doing to me, and the sensations, unlike any I’d ever tasted before, drove me crazy. Toriko’s hand was as maddening as my eye.
Toriko’s left hand had done some awful damage to one of the Fourth Kinds that Runa Urumi was keeping as a pet. Knowing that, I’d been bracing myself for something to happen, or there to be some degree of pain when she touched me for real. But it didn’t hurt at all. The way her hand moved, tracing the outline of my body—its true outline—was as gentle as could be, sensitive yet bold, overflowing with care, incredibly unreserved, and audacious. It felt like it was packed full of all the experiences of being touched by another person.
In another way, different from mine, Toriko was unraveling the person that I was too. I was being decomposed, broken apart. The things that had been pressed into a human form were decompressed, and expanded outwards without limit.
The whole time, I was mystified. What in the world were my eye and Toriko’s hand doing? They perceived beings from the Otherside, reading them like the pages of a book, grasping their depths, and at times harming them. We had walked all this way not knowing what these transformations we’d gained from our contact with the Kunekune really were. Now that we’d turned our powers on one another, I felt like I was coming to a vague understanding of it. The surfaces that had been born in the gap where we made contact with the Otherside—this eye, and this hand—were an interface where human perception, along with the human body, had become unstable.
Even if they were doing things through a different route than the original senses they were based on, they might be doing the same thing. Learning through sight. Learning through touch. I had been afraid to look at Toriko. Toriko had been afraid to touch me. Now, as we were looking at, or touching, our partner directly, tossed about on the waves of madness, we began to gradually find a way to take control of the situation.
There was no helping our own madness. But we could control our partner’s. We both understood that. As we each messed around with the other’s very being, using eye and hand, the way that we were being toyed with, unable to do anything about it, was so incredibly...erotic.
The way we shouted and screamed, spasming and flailing around uncontrollably as we spouted nonsense, it would have looked, to any objective observer, like we’d gone insane. I’m not even sure that we’d maintained our human forms. But as it continued, we each gradually found things the other enjoyed. We each took the other to good places, in a tempest of insanity, until, suddenly, there we came to a lull in the storm. There, in the eye of the typhoon, we found our place of greatest calm.
Inside the lull, words had lost all meaning. We weren’t even speaking in tongues. The giggles, screams, moans, and sighs went on with no end in sight. We were two beasts intertwined.
Those beasts had many bodies. Many faces and limbs appeared only to disappear, grew only to melt away once more. A beautiful Toriko, ugly Toriko, filthy Toriko, monstrous Toriko. The faceless Toriko and the Toriko with the messed up face that I’d seen before were included in the mix too. Those things that appeared before me as mujina may have been doppelgangers of Toriko in a way. Was it the Otherside that showed them to me? Toriko’s unconscious mind? My own fears? Or all of them combined? It didn’t matter which it was anymore. Now that I was stripped bare, with my shell torn off, I could accept all of those Torikos as they were.
And by touching me, Toriko seemed to be sensing many different “me”s. The smooth me, the rough me, the bumpy me, the broken me, the extraneous me, the warm me, the cold me... There were all these “me”s I couldn’t see, and Toriko’s hand was accepting all of them without exception.
These two beasts with all these bodies converged through their desire for one another and were bound together. We were blending together at the interfaces where we connected. The different ‘us’s melted together, without ever becoming a perfect whole, but without fully separating either. Like a chimera made from two types of living being. Or two galaxies colliding.
The color of the calm world was blue. As we whorled together, intertwining, the ultrablue abyss spread out endlessly beneath us. We didn’t fear it. Because this was our place. No one was watching us. No one knew we were here. We were the only ones watching, and the only ones who knew.
So the only things Toriko and I have to fear are each other.
In the midst of the deep, clear blue, we perceived one another. Through sight, touch, and all our sensory organs. On top of a suspension bridge that had completely stopped shaking, we met one another for the very first time.
Lovely and frightening. Frighteningly lovely. We were supposed to be different people, and yet we were so close that we couldn’t part.
Together, we were a single being of the Otherside.
Nice to meet you, Sorawo.
Nice to meet you, Toriko.
Let’s go together. As far as we can. Just the two of us.