“Ito...sha...nou.” A voice, neither human nor animal, emerged from both Todate’s and Hana’s mouths.
“Itossha...nou...”
It had a sad, almost pitying tone. It was peaceful and kind...
Their two bodies, dog and human, had melted together. The human’s hand scratched and petted the fur. The canine’s nose touched and pressed against the skin, and its tongue licked it. Four eyes exchanged glances filled with trust, love, and peaceful contentment.
Toriko and I both stared with our jaws hanging open.
Or rather, we were enthralled.
It was beautiful—a beautiful creature, with a form that could not have existed in the human world. Woman and dog had melded together, but not completely, remaining distinct. Each accepted the other as part of themselves, but at the same time still an entity that they could never be fully compatible with—and loved them.
I could understand.
I—we—were the same way.
Their four eyes suddenly turned to us.
The human eyes narrowed. The dog’s tongue came out. There was no hostility; they were welcoming. Perhaps they understood. They perceived us. It was a warmer reception than when we had visited the Mayoiga before. Back then, Todate and Hana had been friendly, but uninterested in us. The two of them had been closed off to anyone but each other.
Now, they were satisfied. With the completion of their world, their eyes had finally opened to the world around them. With those four dark, glistening eyes on me, I felt like I was being seen by Todate and Hana for the first time.
“Nue...” Toriko said the word. I nodded.
“That’s what this is, yeah.”
We clearly understood what was going on here.
“They” had imitated the nue. They’d seen us become the nue and were trying to do the same, similar to all the other ways they’d imitated humans...
Well, no, not “similar to” but “exactly the same as.”
If “they” didn’t understand humans, then they couldn’t possibly understand nue. They were simply imitating it; the status that Toriko and I had achieved.
I should have been offended. Normally, I would have been.
It was a state Toriko and I had achieved by throwing ourselves at one another, driving ourselves mad, and they’d gone and imitated it by integrating Todate and Hana. It was horrifying, of course. I should have been creeped out.
But that wasn’t how I felt. It was just too beautiful, because I could understand the two of them. To loathe this woman-dog chimera was the logic of the daytime world of human beings, but we were creatures of the night who had become the nue, and this was the world of night.
We had stepped into a place where human reasoning did not apply.
The front line of first contact. That’s where we were right now.
“You laid down your gun,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“This thing, it’s us.”
“You’re right. It’s the same as us,” Toriko replied.
“Are they watching our reaction?”
“Probably, don’t you think?”
“What do we do?”
When I asked, Toriko held the glove on her left hand with her mouth. She pulled it off, revealing her translucent hand, then reached out, bringing her hand closer to the chimera.
The dog face sniffed her left hand, licked it.
I stood next to Toriko, looking up at the chimera. Its human face looked back down at me. Its eyes were peaceful.
I heard a noise, like a clicking tongue, come from the chimera’s throat. As we stared into each other’s eyes, for some reason, I began to feel like I was gazing into two deep, dark holes.
“Itosha, nou... Itosssha...nou.”
Those words it was repeating, they brought tears to my eyes for some reason. I didn’t understand them, yet I knew they were meant for us.
In some part of my mind, I sensed danger. What separated us from this human-dog chimera was getting fuzzier. The boundary between ourselves and everything else had thinned, and we were melting away—that was the vague sense of crisis I felt, but even it was growing hazy...
My consciousness was still, like in the moments before I fell asleep, when all of a sudden—a dog barked.
It was a vivid sensation, like it was right in front of me, and that instantly jolted me awake. Before I could wonder what had happened, I heard a long, echoing gunshot in the distance.
Was that Hana just now?
Was that Todate’s gun?
But they were both right here. Mixed together...
I looked up, thinking I would see the beautiful chimera.
But what was there was not the chimera anymore. It was a great black beast—melded into the darkness behind it, and so massive that I had to look up to see it properly. So much of its form had been swallowed up by darkness that I couldn’t tell what it was. But the swollen bit that was pointed towards us, which I assumed was the head, had a gaping hole in it. Three points of light, placed at equidistant points around the hole, traced geometrical patterns as they spun around and around.
“Itossha...nou,” a baby-like voice echoed from the dark hole.
Itowashi yanou. (How I loathe you.)
Itoshi yanou. (How I love you.)
I heard those two contrasting meanings in it.
There was no need to speak further. Toriko raised her AK. It spewed bullets, the muzzle flashing white in the darkness. I watched with my right eye as they tore through the dark beast’s body.
Without showing any sign of suffering, it began spinning in complicated patterns, as it was sucked into the hole in its head in what looked like an act of self-consumption. It only took seconds for the beast to disappear completely.
There was utter silence.
“Whew...” I let out a wordless sigh. The strength drained from my legs, and I collapsed on the spot.
“That was messed up...” Toriko said, practically clinging to her AK. “We almost got taken away.”
I was too dazed to go anywhere for a while. The shock that I hadn’t been able to feel during contact had hit me belatedly. Toriko was right. We’d come so close to being taken all the way to the other side.
“That howl...” I murmured.
“You heard it too, Sorawo?”
“Yeah. And the gunfire.”
“That was Hana and Todate-san, right?”
We finally got to our feet, and shone our flashlights around.
“Hana!”
“Todate-san! Can you hear us?”
There was no response. The incessant flutes and drums had stopped, and all we could hear now, as before, was the subtle sound of waves.
“Do you think...they saved us?” I asked. Toriko looked out over the lake.
“Y’know, I thought that mixed-up monster was Hana and Todate-san,” she said.
“So did I,” I replied.
That chimera had unquestionably been Todate and Hana, not just an Otherside imitation. The pseudo-humans we had encountered before now all felt wrong in some way. Even Satsuki Uruma, who had been the most eloquent of them, still had something inhuman about her. By contrast, I could say that those two were genuine. The only thing that had changed was their form.
“Did they start out trying to take us with them, then stop?” asked Toriko.
“I dunno...” I replied. “This is just a guess, but maybe they didn’t really want to take us. Basically, ‘they’ wanted to pull us over to the other side, but Todate-san and Hana didn’t...”
“So they were used purely as a sort of mirror to draw our attention, then?”
“I think that the two of them have no hostility towards us, but also don’t really want to mix with us. Todate-san and Hana are strictly a pair, and they have no need for anyone else.”
“That’s why they warned us, so we wouldn’t go any deeper...”
“It might be simpler than that. More of a ‘don’t come any closer.’”
“So we got rejected? Heh heh!” Toriko let out a chuckle.
We stayed there awhile, staring at the dark lake.
“They seemed happy,” Toriko suddenly said. “Am I weird to think that? I mean, normally, it’d be a shock to see them in that state, but...I ended up thinking ‘good for them.’”
“I get it. They seemed...I dunno how to put it, but incredibly content.”
“Would it be good if we ended up like that?”
“Do you want to?”
That question got me a weird look from Toriko.
“Wh-What?” I asked.
“I was just thinking how sexy this entire conversation is.”
“Are you out of your mind?”
Toriko just laughed and didn’t answer the question.
Of course she was out of her mind. I knew that. But hey, I had been thinking the same thing.
After a long pause, I said, “Let’s go home.”
“Yeah.”
We turned, and headed back the way we came. The glow sticks showed the way in the darkness.
We left the lake, climbed the hill, and returned to a place where the light of day could reach. There we stopped and stood still once more, in a daze.
The Mayoiga at the top of the hill, which had been reduced to a ruin earlier, was now back to normal.
The gardens and mansion were as well-kept as the first time we’d seen them. It felt like, if we squinted hard enough, we might be able to see Todate wandering the halls. Maybe we would hear Hana sniffing, or the sound of her claws on the floor. That was far more ominous and unsettling than the chimera we’d seen down at the lake.
We would likely never set foot in this place again.